Bold Sons of Erin (17 page)

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 used 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.”

“I take it you get on well with Mr. Donnelly?”

“Donnelly’s all right. Keeps the Irish in line.”

“Except when they march on troop trains and force the recruits out of the cars. Or when they threaten insurrection. Or when generals are murdered on the roads.”

“Now, you listen to me,” he said, sitting back up and terminating our brief intimacy. Still, his voice was not as forceful as he wished it. “That’s all behind us. The draft’s in abeyance up here, and that’s the best thing for everybody. No need to make any more trouble.”

“A general is dead. And a girl was murdered before him.”

“Well, I don’t know a thing about any dead girl,” he said. “I told you that.” But something there was in his tone of a sudden—something small—that made me disbelieve him now. “As for your dead general, well, maybe he should’ve minded
his
own business, instead of aggravating the Irish with his recruitment nonsense.” He tried to look me in the eyes, but failed to maintain the glare he had intended. “Meddlers always get themselves into trouble, don’t think they don’t.”

He sat back in his creaking chair, with the daylight rich behind him.

“And . . . I suppose I am a meddler here, Mr. Oliver?”

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. But you just tell me why this general matters so much? Doesn’t seem to be no shortage of them, judging by the papers.”

“Because he was murdered. And because the law is the law.”

He sniffed, almost laughed out loud, but did not trust himself to do so. “Well, now, you know that’s a no-good pot of beans. The law’s only the law when the law has a mind to be the law. At least in this county. And you and I both know it.”

“Was Daniel Boland a violent man?”

“Danny Boland? Not likely. Wasn’t even a drinking man. I told you. Always mooning over his wife, that’s what I always heard tell. Just a little fellow. Oh, not small like you are. But smaller than the typical fella. Liked to sing. But, then, they all do.”

“And what exactly did Boland say when he made his confession of murder?”

Mr. Oliver grew excited again. “What did he say? What do you mean? He said he killed that general, up on the hill, and that he did it all by himself.” His Adam’s apple pulsed back to life and he ran a palm over his baldness, where sweat shone
despite the room’s chill. “And that’s all he said. Over and over. Couldn’t shut him up for the life of me. He just kept saying, ‘
I
killed him,
I
was the only one killed the general.’ Over and over. Until they took him away.”

“Who took him away?”

“Oh, Donnelly. And the boys. There’s a young fellow comes around now and then, coal-black beard. Not employed by the works. He just seems to pass through. They took him off. Claimed the boy didn’t know what he was saying, that he was raging with fever.”

“So . . . they knew of the murder, then?”

“Well, that’s neither here nor there. Boland was shouting it all down the street before he come busting in here. Just ran down the street hollering, ‘I killed him, I killed him!’” Mr. Oliver shook his head in wonder at the memory. “I swear to God, I’ve never seen a man so desperate to convince the world he’d committed a crime. A murder, at that.” He pondered the matter. “I suppose it’s all that Catholic business, all their nonsense about confessions and things like that. Maybe that’s what drove him to it.”

“Well, I have only a few more questions, Mr. Oliver. Mary Boland, now. You said that she was a beautiful girl”—no sooner had I said it but I remembered it was the priest who had agreed with the word “beauty,” while the overseer deemed her a “pearl”—“but the Irish thought there was something queer about her. Do you have any—”

The glass exploded inward an instant before I heard the shot. I threw myself to the floor, falling amid a thousand bits of glass. The ball had punched into the door behind me, splintering its panel.

“Jesus,” Mr. Oliver cried, “what the hell?”

Then he saw me on the floor and joined me there. A moment later, I was up, with my back against a side wall and my Colt out from under my frock coat.

Fresh air rushed into the room. Most of the glass had shattered away, but all I could see were birch trees, dust and a muledriver with a dumbfounded look on his face.

I heard shouts and clumsy commands given in German. Boots thumped over planks, rushing through the outer office.

“Herr Major! Herr Major! Sind Sie wieder ermordet?”

I opened the door, its upper portion a thing of splinters, and disappointed Sergeant Dietrich a second time with my good health and well-being.

Fortunate I was, for the glass had not even struck my face, although I cut my palms a bit when I threw myself down to the floor. Mr. Oliver was not quite so fortunate, for the back of his neck and head were bleeding. He looked astonished, as if awakened to the Day of Judgement on a Tuesday.

“Sergeant Dietrich,” I said, in my terse voice of command, “tell your men to come back from wherever you have sent them. They will not find the man who fired the shot. No need to make a fuss.” When he failed to jump to his duty, still marveling at my good health, I said, “Do what I tell you, man!”

I turned me back to Mr. Oliver, tucking my pistol away. “Sit you down there, and let me look at the damage.”

He took his chair obediently. I turned him so his wounds faced toward the light. Framed by the shattered window, I was unbothered. For there had been time enough to think things through, after my soldier’s alert at the sound of gunfire. The shot had been but a warning. You do not shoot to kill a man you cannot see properly. The window glass itself had been the target. Twas meant to make a fuss, and that was all.

“Well, you may yet live to be a hundred,” I told Mr. Oliver, with his blood on my paws, mingling with my own. I drew a bit of glass from the fringe of hair ringing his scalp. The poor fellow cowered at the discomfort. “The head always bleeds more than is sensible,” I assured him. “There is no serious injury. Although you could do with a wash and a pair of plasters.”

Twas then I realized that the fellow was weeping. He dropped his arms atop his desk, then buried his bloodied face in his gartered sleeves. Sobbing.

“I don’t want any part of this,” he cried.

NO SOONER HAD I STEPPED OUT onto the porch of the office than Mr. Donnelly himself appeared, dragging a boy by the ear and shaking an ancient musket.

“Get along with you,” he told the boy, “you dirty, little bugger.”

At the sight of me atop the steps, Donnelly smiled like all the sunshine in a Galway summer. He shoved the lad forward. Ragged and thatched with the reddest hair of Leitrim the boy was.

“And there you are, Major Jones!” Donnelly called as he approached, “And your fine, lovely morning all spoilt! But it’s happy I am to see you’ve taken no great injuries from all the shooting and banging we’ve had amongst us.” Fair grinning he was, between grimaces at his prisoner. “I’ve told them, haven’t I told the great pack of them, a thousand times, if once, they’re not to go after their hunting near the colliery. And to stay out of the yards. Ah, but the young are hard-headed, and do not listen.”

He shoved the boy toward me. “Speak your piece now, Master O’Neill, or the major’ll haul you off to the county clinker.”

The boy was the very picture of repentance. He scraped and bowed as if to an English landlord.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he told me, “for all your endangerments. I meant na harm, I didn’t, sir.”

“No,” I told the lad, “I am certain you did not mean me harm.” And that was true, for I marked no powder traces upon the boy’s cheek, no stain of the sort left by muskets.

I went down the steps, relying upon my cane no more than was necessary. For I do not wish mankind to think me unable. I smiled at the boy. And as I smiled, I stretched out my hand and grasped him by the right shoulder, giving it a friendly squeeze.

He did not wince. Yet, a boy his size, had he fired the great antique cannon that Mr. Donnelly dandled, would have had his shoulder bruised to a misery.

That boy had no more fired the gun than I had.

“Ah, but that’s princely good and understanding of you, Major,” Donnelly told me. Smiling that little smile of his, the cat
that ate the canary. “And won’t he be in for a grand strappin’ when Johnnie O’Neill comes off his shift, for that window’s bound to come out of the father’s pay. And him with six at home, and another one coming, God bless us.” He glowered at the lad with that grand theatricality the Irish enjoy. “Oh, won’t you be sorry then, young Napper, you’ll get such a belt from your da. Now it’s off to the house with you, and tell your mither of all the troubles you’ve made us.”