One of Us (9 page)

I tried calling her but she wouldn’t speak to me. When I told her my name, I heard a panicked gasp on the other end before she hung up.

I make a trip back to the States every couple of years. I usually don’t venture farther than my apartment in New York City, but I decided this time to visit the old homestead and to pay a visit to dear cousin Marcella Greger to discuss this terrible secret and her misguided belief that she was Anna’s best friend.

After checking into the Barclay Holiday Inn with a marquee advertising karaoke night and the upcoming nuptials of Tyler and Brytnee (I asked at the front desk and her name wasn’t misspelled), I take a seat in the chlorine-saturated air at a table in the bar with a view of the atrium and the indoor pool.

I’m about to go back to the front desk and complain about a lack of service when a waitress finally appears. She rushes over to me, apologizing profusely, and explaining that they don’t get many customers in the middle of a weekday and that she’s all alone.

She’s young and cute despite her awful brassy blond dye job and
too much foundation and metallic shadow that completely overpowers her pretty blue eyes. It would be very cool if she was a descendant of the yellow-haired girl with the red stilettos.

“My name’s Heather,” she tells me. “What can I get you?”

“Jack Daniel’s and Coke and please put more Jack in it than Coke.”

“Okay,” she says, biting her lower lip, “but I’ll have to charge you for a double or I could lose my job.”

I smile at her.

“And you wouldn’t want to lose a great job like this one.”

We both look around us at the Holiday Inn atrium, at the empty poolside tables with their drooping, lopsided umbrellas faded not by sun but by age, the fake palm trees, the stacks of chairs against a wall waiting to be set out again for the next retirement banquet or wedding reception.

In the distance, an ice machine clunks and growls. In the pool, three pudgy children shriek, splash, and smack each other.

“It’s a good job for here,” Heather asserts.

“There’s a whole big world out there.”

“I know, but I like it here.”

“Why? Don’t tell me it’s because of a boyfriend.”

“No.”

She blushes. I love girls who blush.

“I don’t have a boyfriend right now. I don’t know why I stay here. I guess ’cause my family’s here. I got lots of friends, too.”

She gives me a quick once-over, appreciating what she’s seeing even though I know she doesn’t realize what she’s seeing: the five-inch heels of my Louboutin boots, my Moroccan print Albert Elbaz tunic over black skinny jeans, my distressed leather Versace motorcycle jacket, my lips glistening with Guerlain Folie de Grenat, and the six-carat ruby on my right ring finger.

“Are you here on vacation?” she asks me. “You look like you’re on vacation.”

“Why would someone come here on a vacation?”

She laughs.

“I admit there’s not much going on. It’s sure not Disney World.”

“It’s not even Carpet World.”

She laughs again.

“But it’s a nice place,” she insists.

“If you like rust and fat people.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you said that.”

As if to prove my point, an obese woman in a cherry-red one-piece looking for all the world like a gigantic jacks ball, carrying a
People
magazine and a Big Gulp, comes walking toward the pool, her flip-flops slapping in time with the rhythmic rumble of the ice machine.

She stops at the edge of the pool and screams at the children to stop screaming.

Heather blushes again.

“Then are you from around here?”

“I used to be but I moved away a long time ago.”

“Yeah, that’s what people do. They either move away or stay. Where do you live now?”

“Paris.”

“Oh my God, that’s so exciting. Can you speak French?”

“Tu es une fleur sur un tas de fumier.”

“What did you say?”

“You’re a flower on a pile of shit.”

Her blush deepens.

“Thanks.”

She’s sweet. I’d like to take her back to my room and strip off her polyester uniform, wipe the gunk off her face, and jab her all over with one of my mother’s vintage hat pins for dying her hair that color. She’d thank me for it later.

“I better go get your drink.”

She hurries off and returns quickly.

“Anything new happening around here, Heather?” I ask as I take the glass from her.

“Nothing’s gone on here for a long time, but all of a sudden there’s a lot going on.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Well, do you know about the Nellie O’Neills?”

“Of course. I grew up here.”

“Well, the gallows are coming down.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, I’m not.”

“Unbelievable. After all these years.”

“And yesterday the man who owned them and sold them back to Walker Dawes so he could tear them down was found lying dead right next to them.”

“No!”

“My grandpa says Mr. Husk died of natural causes and he should know. He’s a cop here in town and he saw his body. But there are a lot of people who are saying the Nellies had something to do with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a curse on anyone who tries to get rid of the gallows.”

“Do you think people really believe this?”

“You’d be surprised. It is kind of suspicious. Mr. Husk was scared of the gallows. He thought they were haunted. When he was a kid he saw the ghost of Prosperity McNab outside his bedroom window and then the next day he found the name of Prosperity’s wife written on a bathroom mirror in lipstick.”

“Lipstick?” I try not to laugh since she’s obviously taking all of this very seriously.

“That’s what people told him it was, but he was convinced it was blood.”

“You know a lot about Mr. Husk.”

“One of my aunts cleaned house for them for a long time. She used to hear Mrs. Husk blabbing on the phone all the time. Making fun of her husband was one of her favorite things to do.”

The blush returns.

“How about you, Heather? Do you believe in ghosts and curses?”

“No, not really. But I’ve always thought it was really creepy to keep those gallows around all these years. How about you? Do you believe?”

“I believe people need to make up things to help them cope with the randomness of death.”

She looks confused.

“Huh?” she says.

“I knew a girl at the private school I used to attend who had everything going for her. She was rich. She was beautiful. Everybody loved her. Then one day out of the blue she had some kind of bizarre seizure that killed her. She was only fifteen. We found her in her room. There was foam all around her mouth and her lips were blue and her body was covered with these disgusting blisters.”

Heather’s eyes fill with horror.

“There was no explanation for this terrible tragedy. Wouldn’t it have been better for all of us if we could have believed she was the victim of a curse?”

“I’m—I’m not sure,” Heather stutters.

I finally take a sip of the drink and frown at her.

“Can’t you do better than this? No one’s going to find out. Come on. Live dangerously. Life is short.”

She rushes off and returns a few minutes later. She sets my drink back on the table and leans toward me. I feel her breath tickle the inside of my ear.

“I made it extra strong,” she whispers.

nine

O
N MY WAY TO
Marcella’s house I decide to drive through Lost Creek. I marvel at how bleak and depressing everything looks. The original shanties the miners lived in fell down a long time ago. The homes standing now were built at the turn of the last century and they’re not much of an improvement: rows of flimsy boxes built into hillsides so steep they appear to be leaning. At first glance most of them look abandoned, but driving slowly past I see curtains in dark windows and muddy footprints on front porches and other signs of habitation.

The streets come together at the bottoms of their inclines to the only level part of town, where there are a few shops and businesses and several buildings that were obviously a source of pride in their day: a bank with a marble façade and padlocked revolving doors; a hotel still wearing some of its faded Victorian colors—mint green with peeling lilac gingerbread trim—turned into apartments with To Rent signs hanging in its shuttered windows; the one and only department store, its display windows crisscrossed with plywood and graffiti.

Across the street from the bank is a bar with a red door and a sign depicting a lop-eared, red-eyed rabbit holding a pint of foamy beer and a plain brick building next to it called Kelly’s Kwik Shop. Its windows are filled with flyers and ads.

I park my rental Rover and walk into the store, pausing to glance at a piece of cardboard with “Nellie O’Neill Merchandise Inside” written on
it and a brass historical-landmark plaque beside it. This is the site of the original Lost Creek Coal & Oil company store.

I feel a little thrill as I pass through the door, realizing every one of the Nellies would have spent some time in this very room. They would have walked over these same floorboards and stared at these same walls, but my excitement is short-lived when I discover that the interior has been completely gutted and modernized to resemble every other crappy convenience store that’s sprung up over the past forty years: buzzing fluorescent lights, cracked linoleum, the smell of burnt coffee, aisles of candy and snacks with a few light bulbs and packs of batteries thrown in, a refrigerated section in back stocked with soda pop and ice cream, and a glass case of cigarettes behind the cash register. I don’t see any so-called food that doesn’t come in a wrapper or a can.

Two elderly town matrons dressed in the floral-patterned blouses and color-coordinated polyester pants apparently mandated to all rural females over the age of fifty are absorbed in conversation with a large woman behind the counter.

One of them is wearing a brick-red overcoat with a black velvet collar over her ensemble and a plastic kerchief even though it’s not raining, and the other has on a knee-length nubby cardigan of the most disorienting mixture of pinks and purples I’ve ever seen.

A bleary-eyed, scruffy man in a snowsuit the color of a coffee stain and a bright orange ball cap is perched on a nearby stool drinking dejectedly from a mug topped with whipped cream. His face is chapped from the cold and he keeps wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“Hello,” I greet all of them.

They smile and nod.

The old ladies have kind faces, but I can tell from the gnarled arthritic knuckles and the small humble gold crosses dangling from both their necks that these are hard old-country broads who are no strangers to disappointment and pain and would easily turn their backs on me if they thought I was here to cause any trouble for their tribe.

I start browsing through the strange, sad collection of Nellie O’Neill souvenirs: books on the subject, key chains, mugs, pens, T-shirts, CDs of Irish folk songs, rosaries, crucifixes, fake white roses
with accompanying cards explaining how each Nellie was given a white rose in his cell the night before his execution, and two hand-carved wooden models of the gallows.

Sitting in the midst of it all is a framed needlepoint sampler that reads, “In memory of James McNab, Peter Tully, Henry McAnulty, Kenny Kelly, Denis Daley, William Fahey, James Shaw, John Kerrigan, Charles Sullivan, and Jack Donoghue.”

“I don’t believe in curses, but you gotta admit it’s damned strange,” the woman behind the counter says.

She’s younger than the other two but not young. She has a mean moon face and I instantly don’t like her.

“Oh, come now, Moira,” the woman in the coat chides her. “There’s nothing that strange about it. The man had a heart attack.”

“At the gallows,” her friend in the sweater pipes up. “And after selling them back to Walker Dawes.”

Moira nods.

Heather was right. Everyone in town
is
talking about the death of Simon Husk.

“Stop it, Birdie,” the woman in the coat says. “The two of you have caused enough hysteria for one day.”

She glances at the man over the tops of her glasses.

He doesn’t look up from his mug but seems to sense her displeasure with him. He shifts in his padded suit.

“Parker had his heart in the right place,” Birdie says in his defense. “He was trying to protect us.”

“Baloney! Protect us from what? You of all people, Birdie, should know how hard we’ve worked to be taken seriously. This kind of publicity degrades the Nellies and all that they stand for.”

“Which is?” I butt in.

They all look my way. Even Parker.

“Can I help you with anything?” Moira asks me.

“No, thank you,” I reply. “I’m just looking around.”

“Are you here to see the gallows?”

“In a way.”

“Where are you from?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“Yes.” I tap one of my lacquered fingernails on the countertop. “Right here.”

She makes a frankly skeptical appraisal of my outfit.

“Can someone answer my question? What exactly do the Nellies stand for? Which side are you on? Do you believe they were innocent? Completely innocent? As in they didn’t club one of their pit bosses to death in front of his house while his wife and children watched from inside, or slit the throat of another one while he was asleep in his bed, or cut off the ears of an informer, or cut out the tongue of a priest, or set fires and dynamite railroad cars, or that they did but they were justified because of the treatment they received in the mines?”

“You shouldn’t be disrespectful,” Moira tells me.

“A person who sells T-shirts that say ‘I got hung up at the Lost Creek gallows’ is accusing me of being disrespectful?” I wonder aloud. “I’ll take one of these, by the way.”

I push the shirt across the counter toward her.

“I’m not the one selling this stuff and I don’t get any money from it. All the proceeds go to the Nellie O’Neill Historical Society. Right here’s the president, Nora Daley.”

I look at the old lady in the coat. She pulls a business card out of her pocketbook and explains she’s also the curator of the Nellie museum in the attic of her house.

“And I’m Birdie, the activities secretary,” the one in the sweater informs me. “I did the needlepoint.”

“It’s a pleasure, ladies. I didn’t mean any disrespect. I was simply asking a question.”

“That’s fine by us,” Nora says. “We’re happy to answer. Our claim is some were innocent and others were provoked. They deserved some form of punishment but not death. There were killings on the other side, too.”

“Sounds like a reasonable claim to me. Remind me again, what’s the story behind their name?”

“Nellie O’Neill was a widow back in Ireland,” Nora begins. “She
and her six children were turned out of their home by an English landlord’s bailiff for not being able to meet the rent. When she resisted and threw herself in the mud at his feet begging for more time, he called her a name that so upset her youngest boy he threw a clod of dirt at the bailiff, who turned around and horsewhipped him to death in front of his mother.

“Later that night, the bereaved Nellie, mad with grief, snuck into the bailiff’s home and with the help of the housemaid, she stabbed him to death with the same knife he had used earlier that evening to carve the lamb he served to his own family.

“She was found, tried, and hung, and her remaining children were scattered to the wind.”

“Right,” I say. “I remember now. The Nellies were the ultimate mama’s boys.”

“If you’re from around here you should know all this,” Moira snaps at me.

“I was sent away to school when I was very young and it was traumatic. You wouldn’t understand. I doubt you’ve ever lived anywhere but here. I’m sure you’re too afraid to venture out into the world.”

Her face reddens.

“Some people stay where they was born and raised because they want to, not because they’re afraid to leave.”

“I suppose. But it’s rare. Most people who stay do it because they’re afraid to leave, and most people who leave do it because they’re afraid to stay. If you stop and think about it you’ll find that fear is the motivating factor for most decisions people make in their lives.”

“That’s a terrible way to look at life,” Birdie says.

“It’s the truth. What are you afraid of?” I ask them. “And don’t say spiders or the dark. What really freaks you out?”

“Spiders,” Birdie replies right away, clutching her arms. “I hate spiders.”

“Being lost in space,” Parker volunteers from his stool.

Birdie chuckles.

“I don’t think you have to worry much about that.”

“Cancer,” Nora answers seriously.

“People who throw things when they get mad,” Birdie adds to her list, “and spoiled potato salad.”

“None of you are afraid of ghosts?” I ask.

They laugh and shake their heads.

“Of course not,” they assure me.

I pay for my T-shirt and also a box of Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. When in Rome.

AS LONG AS I’M
here I decide to finally take a look at the gallows up close and personal.

The site is a disgrace. The brick wall surrounding the yard is crumbling in places and has its fair share of graffiti, none of it artistic or witty. The gallows themselves aren’t impressive at all except for their size. Original Walker added two extra crossbars in order to be able to hang four men at once. Walker’s Wonder they called it in the newspapers. No one had ever attempted to build anything like it before. Say what you like about Walker Dawes, when it came to business, he was one efficient bastard.

Standing before them, I try to feel something. I envision the families of the Nellies waiting to watch their men swing. Most of the executed were very young if I remember correctly, although back then a boy would have started working in the breaker room when he was five, gone into the pits in his early teens, and could already be married and have a couple of kids by the time he was twenty.

What were they thinking? Aside from the terror and obvious grief, they must have been angry. I mean, really, really angry; the kind of anger that had led to the Nellies committing the acts that landed them here in the first place. Every single man, woman, and child probably felt the same way, but only a few had acted on it.

I guess you couldn’t blame them. They’d been duped. They were told there would be plenty of work for them here in America. They were promised fair wages and decent homes. Their children would be able to go to school. They’d have religious freedom, too, and best of all, they’d be thousands of miles away from English persecution. This was
the propaganda spread by guys like O. W. (the Original Walker), American mine owners who were just beginning to feel the need for cheap unskilled labor to dig the coal, which was quickly becoming the nation’s most desired fuel and would make them all filthy rich.

What the Irish found was very different from what they expected. They had left English landlords behind only to encounter something much worse: American businessmen.

Nothing hurts more than betrayal. I know. I’ve experienced my fair share of it. And I have to say—but never to my father—that I completely understand where the Nellies were coming from.

Anna was the source of most of my information about the Nellies, and that meant I received a decidedly biased account. Her great-grandmother was Peter Tully’s aunt. I asked my dad once if he knew my nanny was related to one of the men his grandfather had been responsible for executing. He said he didn’t care; throw a rock around here and you’re going to hit someone who claims to be related to someone who died that day.

Anna had experienced betrayal, too. She told me about her boyfriend and how he got another girl pregnant and married her, but how she still loved him and he still loved her. I was a kid and didn’t understand anything about romantic love, but even so, I thought the situation sounded messed up.

Anna was not attractive and I thought that might have something to do with why she clung to this loser, but I also sensed part of the reason she looked the way she did was because she didn’t try. No makeup. Dowdy clothes. Unfortunate red curly hair, the frizzy kind. But looking back on her now, I think she had a pretty good bod and she had deeply dark eyes, unusual in a redhead with a fair complexion. When I did something she approved of, they shined with the same pretty gloss as my black patent leather party shoes after a good polish.

I make my way into the jail next. It’s one more unremarkable structure. Four cells with nothing in them except a small wooden cot on either side.