Bold Sons of Erin (12 page)

The deputy looked down at my leg and cane.

“I will walk,” I repeated. “Now get you home.” I turned to Mr. Downs. “Do not forget to send a wagon or such in the morning.”

And they obeyed me. But as they left, I heard the teamster muttering. Perhaps he spoke intending I should hear.

“I tole the damn fool, Ab, and you heard me when I tole him. Welsh don’t have a lick of sense, if it ain’t to do with money or singing hymns. Get on, mules. After I come out for that general feller, I had to sweep my wagon down with quicklime. Get on, now.”

GLAD I WAS that I wore good boots, not shoes. For the mud had such a great suck to it that I think it would have liked to steal my legs. I recall hoping that my other uniform had come properly clean, because the one I wore would look a sight. The mud leapt onto my rubber cape and crept beneath its folds. As if the muck were a living thing that hoped to drag me down.
The weight of the wet and the slop fair bent me over, and I will admit my leg gave me discomfort.

Twas not yet late enough to call it night, but dark rain hid the world. I curled my hands beneath my cape, for the cold had a sting impatient for the snows. Glum I was, but determined. I would have answers before I next left Heckschersville. Nor would I subscribe to Irish threats or succumb to the pranks of drunkards. I could defend myself as well as any man. And better than most, that I will tell you plain.

Not that I intended violence, mind you. But I wished to have my questions answered proper.

The rain pressed down the evergreen boughs and bent the birches where miners had ripped the earth. The sky grumbled. A wind made every drop of wet a lash. My going was slow and miserable, and when the gale blew through the gashes the miners had left on the hillside, it seemed to draw a howl of pain from the stone. Twas a broken, bitter place, all ruination, each dig abandoned once the coal was gone. It is a queer thing, but I find a certain eeriness where the earth has been torn apart, as if some desecration has been done. It is only good business, I know, and I myself had my small profit from it when I worked in a colliery countinghouse. But I wondered if, one day, our lovely county would look like that entirely, bare and wounded.

The hard rain did not help my failing mood. Determined I was, but dreary and losing spunk. As if my act of resolve to return to Heckschersville had drained all of the manly vigor from me. I did not even find the strength to sing myself a hymn as I went along.

I slogged.

I would have jumped at the woman’s voice, but the mud would not allow it. It seemed to hold me fast the moment she spoke.

“Bist Du der Freund? Der lange verborgene Freund? Bist Du endlich gekommen, um meiner zu hilfen?”

She was but a moving lump at first, a grayness in the gray, all bent and crouched and wrapped in a hundred rags. Her voice
was decrepit and pained, yet she sounded queerly hopeful as she approached.

Now, my Dutch is not sufficient to make out mumbles. But I thought I heard the German word for “friend,” followed by a question about help.

“Nix verstehe,”
I told the emerging form.
“Kenne Sie nix, gute Frau.”
Thus Germans say they do not understand or know a person.

She worked her way through the clinging mud toward me. I thought she must fall, but she only laughed at her troubles. If the scraping that left her throat might be called a laugh.

The oddest thing was that I began to smell her. Despite the rain, with her ten feet away.

“Ja, ja. Der lange verborgene Freund ist zu uns gekommen! Endlich is er gekommen!”

I began to suspect the woman was deranged, for clear enough it seemed she had mistaken me. Perhaps she was thinking of someone loved and lost, as elders will.

Her stench was awful. The beating rain could not wash it away. As she neared, it enfolded me like a blanket.

Now, I have been a soldier and do not imagine the world perfumed with lavender water. But the reek of her caught in my throat as she leaned toward me. I do not think I have ever smelled a living thing so rancid, or so foul. She smelled as if she had been dead a week.

“Madam,” I tried, “I am not this friend of yours.
Nix Freund, verstehe?
Do you speak English? Are you in need of help?”

I do not know why, but my voice began to fail me.

A hand stretched out from her rags as she staggered closer. Near to a claw it looked.
“Ja, ja. Englisch, Deutsch. Alles egal. Die alte Sprache ist die gute Sprache.”
And then she began to chant in words that were utterly foreign to my ear, despite my travels and all my years in India. Twas strange as anything ever heard by man, and might have been the very speech of madness.

Her hand nearly touched me, then faltered. I thought she had slipped. I steeled myself and reached out to keep her from falling. For she was old and troubled, such was clear.

Of a sudden, lightning flashed and the crone recoiled. The shawl or hood that had clung to her head fell away.

Oh, light enough there was to see that face. I never shall forget it. Beneath a wild thatch of hair, the woman was leprous. Either with that horrid disease itself, or with some mold that chews upon the skin. Rotten as a corpse she looked, as if she were dying from the outside in. I may have gagged, I cannot say for certain. Yet, I could not move or look away.

The worst part of the creature was her eyes, not the ravaged flesh. One eye was a lump of pus, overgrown to sicken the strongest stomach, while the other glowed and bulged in mortal terror.

She
was afraid. Of me. She reeled back through the slop, snarling out her dread through broken teeth. Waving her hands to fend me off, as if I meant to attack her.

God knows why the woman took fright of me. Twas not a thing a fellow might explain. The scar upon my cheek is not so terrible. And though I am no handsome man, I think that I will do for common intercourse.

“Falsch, falsch, falsch!”
she screamed.
“Ist ’ne Luege, ’ne Luege. Er ist nicht der Freund . . .”

She stumbled backward through the mud, drawing her cowl to conceal her hair and face again. Her attention turned to spirits concealed from my view. She no longer seemed to see me at all, but waved at some apparition imposed between us.

“Er ist der Tod, und nicht der gute Freund! Lass mich in Ruhe, du braune Heidenshure! Lass . . . mich . . . in . . . Ruhe!”

I understood the repeated word “false,” the words for “lies” and “death,” and that I was not the friend she had expected. Oddly enough, she spoke of a “brown whore” of some description. Then she howled in her nonsense language fit to raise the devil.

She tripped, but did not fall, as she retreated. She seemed afraid to turn her back upon me, although I meant her no harm of any kind. With hands outstretched, she sought to hold
off demons. Lost in a maze of delusions, she was. Howling at Heaven and Hell.

Of a sudden, she crouched down, swinging her claws at the rain itself and lunging at the air. As if invisible birds had come to plague her.

I stood fixed to the spot. Or transfixed, I should say. For though she fled as swiftly as she could, the image of that face remained before me.

When she judged the distance between us sufficient for safety, she twisted about and scuttled into the trees, disappearing into the early darkness.

Now, I do not have a superstitious bone in my body. It is simply that some things are reluctant of explanation. You leave such matters alone, and that is that. As I continued down that hill, shuddering with the cold, I recited Bible verses to myself. For Scripture spoken aloud is a soothing thing. And I will admit to looking around behind myself, but only now and then, at peculiar sounds.

Soon enough, I heard the pump-house engines, throbbing like native drums. The other colliery noises, the hangings and scrapes, were down for the close of the working day, and buildings deserted until the morrow loomed out of the downpour. I passed the yards and the rain was so thick I could not spy the high wheel of the colliery, though I saw a black-windowed office. Mr. Oliver and his clerks would have taken themselves home before night fell, and wise they were. Then I smelled mules, but could not see their barn. Slick to break a leg, sets of rails traced over the earth, the narrower pairs for the pit cars and the broad-gauge for the locomotives come up from the depot to take off the coal. A wooden bridge over the creek led toward the patch, dividing the worlds of labor and of rest. Up a gentle grade lay a scatter of dwellings, little more than outlines in the gloom. The patch was not laid out in rows, as were most company settlements, but had grown up haphazard on a hillside. As if those shanties themselves refused all discipline.

Lamps shone in the windows, though few and turned down low. Kerosene costs money at the company store, as do candles, and collieries watch their inventories closely to insure that no supplies are taken home. Yet, I looked upon those weak lights with longing, wondering why I had been such a fool to come back in the rain. By now, I might have been nearly home, where the stove would be warm and glowing in the parlor. I could have spent my night with those I loved.

I am a headstrong man, and sometimes foolish. Although I like to think that I mean well.

After it lulled me with a moment’s slackening, the rain struck back with little nails of ice. Twas full dark come. The night had dropped a blanket over the mining patch, hiding all its secrets from the world, and the only sounds were of pumps and pounding rain.

Wet through, despite my cape, I wandered about in the deluge until I heard a piano and the unsteady hum of men gathered in the warm. That one place was well lit, with a poorly painted board nailed to the porch, declaring I had arrived at the T. RYAN HOTEL, which offered ROOMS, MEALS, LIBATIONS.

I did not even get through the door before the music broke off and the world fell silent.

A PLOT OF RAGS had been laid just past the threshold and I stood there letting the worst of the water run off me. Covered with muck I was, and wet as a river. I fear that my appearance was undignified.

Two dozen men crowded in that place, and their eyes were fixed upon me. I sensed a mood well short of Christian charity.

The air was thick with the smells of wet wool, sweat and beer, of ashes acrid in a tub and coal burning in the stove. Above their half-drained glasses, the younger men held pipes of modern fashion, but their elders smoked the long clay pipes of Ireland. The walls were bare, except for a bit of green bunting, faded now, and some fraternal order’s paraphernalia. There
was no motion but dawdling smoke and the publican’s rag as it swept along the bar.

I saw him, sitting back-to-the-wall. John Kehoe. The black-bearded fellow who wielded such authority.

“A good evening to you, gentlemen,” I said to all the room. Giving my feet a last swipe on the cloths, I hooked my rubber cape on the rack by the door. I kept my cap in hand, though, for the brass upon it costs a pretty penny.

No one replied to my greeting, so I took me up to the fellow behind the bar. The tip of my cane skittered over the grit ground into the floor by the boots of countless miners. Twas not a place to please the high and mighty.

I gave a glance toward Kehoe as I went. Of all the faces in that room—some hard and set, while others smiled wickedly—only his seemed empty of expression.

Except for his eyes. They burned hotter than the coal behind the grate.

The barkeep was twice broader at the hips than at the shoulders. If ever he had gone down the mines, it had been years before. Red ghosts of hair clung to a freckled scalp, and his pug nose was as Irish as the shamrock.

At my approach, he dropped his rag and crossed his arms over his apron.

“Good evening, sir,” I said. “I would like to take a room for the night, if you please.”

“No rooms,” he said. “We’re full up, bucky-boy.”

“Well, then, I would gladly share a room with another.”

“They’re all shared up already. Every one.”

“I believe there is another hotel in town, then?”

“Mrs. Egan’s full up, too. Go ask her.”

“Then I will have my dinner and take my leave.”

“You can take your leave, but you’ll leave without your dinner. For the cupboard’s bare and the pot’s as empty as promises.”

That was a lie. I smelled a proper stew. And kitchen noises chinked and chimed through a curtain.

“Then I will have a glass of water, thank you.”

“The well’s dried up. And the tap’s run out on the beer.” He glanced at the litter of bottles lined up behind him. “And all of those are only for decoration.”

I heard the first titter of laughter behind my back. But I would not be vanquished quite so easily.

“Glad I am,” I told him, “to find you have such a prospering business, sir. I have a bit of business in mind myself. Then I will bid you farewell.”

I did not give him time to reply, but turned and marched me over to John Kehoe. He sat between two younger men, at a table cut as rough as the local manners. Nor did I wait for a proper invitation, but drew up a chair and sat me down to the three of them.

“Good evening, Mr. Kehoe,” I said. “I am Major Abel Jones. Pleased I am to find you here tonight.”

His eyes were as black as his beard. Black fires, if you will credit such a phenomenon. He did not reach to take the hand I offered.

The two young men attending him stood up and left the table. The silence gained another layer of quiet.

“My,” I continued, “it is a terrible night. There is good, to come in out of the rain. I do not remember such a cold October.” And I will tell you: That much was true. For my boots and stockings were wet and cold as Lord Franklin’s. The stove sat well across the room, where the old men gathered round it, but that tavern’s warmth seemed a lovely thing to me. Although I have taken the Pledge myself and could not approve of the establishment’s purpose or patrons.

I watched Kehoe, and he watched me, and I kept a firm grip on my cane. I was prepared to fight my way out of that room, if need be. Although I must admit the odds was bad.

I wondered if they could trace the outline of my Colt beneath my frock coat. It is a heavy thing and hard to conceal. The truth is that I was sorry to have it by, for I suspected it would do more to provoke them than to protect me.