That night Earle’s Hotel reigned as New York’s sporting center. Reporters and fans besieged us. Brainard, Waterman, and George were in heavy demand as stars of the victory. Harry was as euphoric as I’d ever seen him.
“Thirteen blanks!” marveled a bearded reporter I later learned was Henry Chadwick, dean of America’s baseball writers, waving his notebook and citing the number of scoreless innings. “Magnificent contest! Most scientific on record!” He claimed it even surpassed the recent rowing championship between Yale and Harvard. “You western boys are rekindling the national game here, no doubt about it!”
The lobby buzzed with speculation about tomorrow’s Atlantic game. And with debate over whether our 15-0 record topped that of the ’sixty-three Brooklyn Eckfords, who had won all nine of their match games, plus every first-class, second-class and amateur contest they had played—nobody knew the exact total—and as the arguments grew heated they included so many classifications and technicalities that I gave up and listened instead to talk of a fight that day in St. Louis. One Mike McCoole, the current American heavyweight champ, had defeated Tom Allen of England. Although illegal, boxing flourished and was passionately followed in both countries. Enormous sums of money must have changed hands this day, I thought.
Champion stood on a table and read a telegram that arrived from the directors of the club.
“ON BEHALF OF THE CITIZENS OF CINCINNATI WE SEND YOU GREETING. THE STREETS ARE FULL OF PEOPLE, WHO GIVE CHEER AFTER CHEER FOR THEIR PET CLUB. GO ON WITH THE NOBLE WORK!”
George joined him atop the table and led cheers. Toasts were offered until Harry protested that we faced two more tough games in successive days.
During all of that I received a message of my own. A courier tapped my shoulder and handed me a sealed letter. I tipped him and tore it open.
Dear Mr. Fowler,
Allow me to express my gratitude for the appreciation you showed following my performance. I will repay you with this vital information: I overheard Mr. M. talking to a certain gambler who will attempt to take your life after tomorrow’s match. Beware passing through the crowd, for that is where it will come. I risk all with this note. Destroy it and never admit its existence.
EH
I stared at the thin sheet. The writing was frilly, its loops and flourishes incongruous with the stark message. EH: Holt. M: Morrissey. The gambler could only be McDermott. I twisted the paper nervously. Should I go to Champion? The police? Get the hell out of New York? But where? I didn’t want to jeopardize my shaky standing with the club. I also didn’t want to die.
Without explaining how I’d been warned, I huddled later with Andy. He called in Brainard and Waterman, and together we came up with a simple plan. I hoped like hell it wasn’t too simple.
Sometime after midnight Andy and I were jolted awake by hammering on our door. Andy opened it. Sweasy and Hurley stood unsteadily outside. They smelled like a distillery. Hurley began to sing.
“Come, let us roam together
O’er the soft and purple heather
From Ulster’s dim gray mountains
To Muskerrys fairy fountains. . . .”
“He’s spifflicated,” said Andy. “We gotta keep him quiet.”
“ ’S as natural for Hibernians to tipple as pigs to root,” Hurley proclaimed. “ ’S your trouble, Andy, you think you’re too good to be properly Irish anymore.”
“That’s true goods!” Sweasy said, scowling at me. He took a lurching step forward. “C’mon, you bastard!” He raised his fists. “You’re bigger’n a shithouse, but I’m meaner’n a singed cat.”
“Oh fuck,” I said, and closed the door in his face.
“Get some sleep, Sweaze,” said Andy. We listened as they lurched down the corridor. “Don’t pay any heed,” he said. “He’s just jealous.”
“Of me?”
Andy nodded. “See, me ‘n’ Sweaze’ve always been roomies. That’s mostly what he’s riled about.”
“Well, hell, I never intended to break up—”
“I know you didn’t. It was my idea, Sam. Like I say, don’t pay it any heed. The tour only runs a couple more weeks. Sweaze an’ me board together in Cincinnati. Everything’ll be hunky by then.”
“What was that Irish stuff?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Dick was just carryin’ on. As for Sweaze, I reckon I’ve changed since we were kids. He’s still the old way, an’ he resents me coming to want new things.”
“Am I connected with that too?”
“No, you’re different.” He did not elaborate.
The morning papers were flooded with descriptions of the victory. Several featured play-by-play accounts. One writer’s use of “red-legged porkopolitans” baffled me, until George explained that it referred to Cincinnati’s thriving hog industry.
Again we took the ferry at midday, but this time the weather was clear and sparkling. Sun sprites danced on the river; a breeze freshened the air. Sweasy, I noticed, wore colored glasses, and Hurley looked dead.
A noisy crowd of twelve thousand awaited us at the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn. I grew increasingly tense. Vehicles jammed the surrounding streets—Nostrand, Marcy, Putnam, Halsey—and spectators scrambled for vantage points. As we alighted from our bus, the Stockings formed a tight phalanx around me according to plan. Forging ahead, bats riflelike on our shoulders, we marched briskly to the diamond. Seeing one loony with binoculars clinging to the lightning rod of a church steeple, I thought it a very good thing that telescopic sights weren’t yet around.
The Capitoline Grounds were spacious enough to hold two games at once. The grass was smooth and level as a billiard table. Banked inclines beyond the foul lines were jammed with wagons and carts. Blue-jacketed cops patrolled in substantial numbers—a comforting sight. The wooden stands were packed beyond capacity.
From a cupola waved the Atlantics’ tiger pennant and banners from years the club had captured the whip pennant: ’61, ’64, ’65, ’66. They reminded me of Celtics’ flags hanging from the rafters of Boston Garden. Andy informed me that Brooklyn had dominated New York baseball for the past decade, the local Eckfords taking the pennant virtually every year the Atlantics didn’t.
Brooklyn and baseball. Grandpa and I listened faithfully to broadcasts of Dodger games in the years just before they moved to the West Coast. My first heroes were Pee Wee, Jackie, and Duke. How powerful I’d be, I used to think, with a name like Duke Snider.
It was ironic to learn from Andy that out on the field now, in ice-white jerseys and charcoal pants and caps, were men who had been his particular boyhood idols: Joe Start, known as “Old Reliable,” the Atlantic first baseman; Dickey Pearce, the dodgy shortstop; and “Young Jack” Chapman, the left fielder.
In recent seasons the Atlantics had added talent: Tommy Pratt, a speed-balling pitcher; Lipman Pike, a true rarity as a power-hitting, left-handed second baseman; Freddy Crane, the whippet center fielder who threw his cap down before grabbing flies; and Bob Ferguson, whose showy one-hand grabs had earned him the press sobriquet “Death to Flying Things.”
I was surprised when Dick Pearce came up to me. He was short and thickly built, with a brush mustache and intelligent brown eyes.
“I heard about your baby hit against the Haymakers, Fowler. Hoped you might show it off for me.”
“Baby hit . . . oh, the bunt.”
“That how it’s called?”
After he assured me he wouldn’t try it against us, I demonstrated squaring away and cushioning the bat. He watched me with a sharp professional eye. “I see it would take some little practice.”
“Some little,” I agreed modestly.
Later, when Pearce squared away at the plate during the game, I thought I’d been suckered. But he used the stance to punch a fair foul past Waterman, despite the latter’s playing him a step in foul territory. There was simply no way to defense the maneuver, I realized. Pearce seemed even more adept at it than Waterman or Hurley, and for good reason: later I learned that he had invented it. With bunts added to his weaponry he would drive opposing infielders crazy.
The game itself, after yesterday’s cliffhanger, was ho-hum. The Atlantics opened with hustle and confident chatter, but began to deflate when we blanked them in the opening frames. Meanwhile, our hitters jumped on Pratt’s fastballs as if to make up for lean production against Wolters. We tallied five runs in the first and iced things with thirteen in the second. Coasting, we won, 32-10. The crowd, rising between innings in a foreshadowing of the seventh-inning stretch, seemed quite impressed by us, as did the Atlantics themselves. Later we heard that it was the worst defeat ever suffered by the proud Brooklyn club.
Allison, playing inspired ball, at one point lunged for a foul tip that caromed off his own neck. Pursuing the ball, he barreled into the batter, knocking him flat. Then, tumbling forward himself, he somehow kept the ball in the air with desperate tips and finally seized it as his chin plowed the sod. He rose to appreciative applause, grinning through clumps of grass and dirt. I considered, not for the first time, the possibility of Allison being not quite mentally balanced.
We moved in a tight orbit from the field. I’d seen no sign of McDermott or Le Caron or even Morrissey—rumor had him winning big on us yesterday—but my blood pumped rapidly. This was when Holt had warned it would come. I wrapped my fingers around the derringer in my pocket. We departed safely. There was no visible threat at the ferry. But I felt a pervasive menace, a sense of being watched by unfriendly eyes. One thing I knew: I wanted out of New York badly.
That night I ventured from our room only to eat, fearful that Holt’s note had been some sort of ruse. Unable to sleep, I began a Harper’s Monthly story called “The Murderous Gypsy Murillo: A Tale of Old California.” It worked like a charm. I was asleep by the third page.
Except that we were back in Williamsburg facing the Brooklyn Eckfords, the next day followed the same pattern. A crowd of eight thousand turned out, even though we were prohibitive favorites.
The Eckfords came out fighting. Their pitcher, Alphonse Martin, who answered to “Phonnie” and “Old Slow Ball,” baffled us with junk in the opening frames. Andy muffed a fly early on, and the Eckfords pushed across several runs. To my relief Andy fielded flawlessly the rest of the way, made a gorgeous over-the-shoulder catch, and lashed four hits. Brainard, relieved by Harry in the closing innings, held the Eckfords to eight hits. The final was 24—5. Our games now completed in New York, the crowd stood and gave us a departing ovation.
Bunched amidst the others, crouching to keep my head from posing a target, I imagined the sudden flash of a blade, the crack of a gun. Move faster! I urged silently. We made the trip without incident, although as we were entering Earle’s I nearly jumped out of my shoes when a group standing in front of the pool hall next door raised cue sticks in mock salute to us. For an instant I thought they were leveling rifles. Gould wasn’t amused either. He stopped and glared. They retreated inside.
That night I made it through four more pages of “Murderous Murillo,” the highlight coming when “the tawny bosom of Rosa fired with dark yearnings on seeing the swarthy countenance of the savage Gypsy bandit framed in the flaps of her tent.” There was a subtle hint that Rosa might even be uncorseted beneath her peasant blouse. Hoo boy.
To the delight of Andy and Sweasy, Champion scheduled a game against the Irvington club. We departed Manhattan after breakfast and crossed to Newark, a booming industrial and shipping center of over a hundred thousand, where smokestacks were eclipsing the earlier charms of graceful church spires and quiet colonial greens.
Champion also arranged for a team publicity shot at Huff’s Photography Palace on Broad Street. Andy asked that I be included, but I begged off. The last thing I wanted was my likeness available to Le Caron or anybody else McDermott might send after me.
I wandered around, eyeing carte-de-visite portraits and stereo cards. On the walls hung samples of everything the studio advertised on the huge sign over its door: Likenesses of Distinguished Statesmen, Eminent Divines, Prominent Citizens, Indian Chiefs, and Notorious Robbers and Murderers. Also—Beautiful Landscapes, Perfect Clouds, and a Bona Fide Streak of Lightning, Taken on the Night of August 26, 1857.
The photographer, a fastidious German with walrus bristles and cantilevered belly, set up his forty-five-second wet collodion-plate exposures. He hissed at the players to be still, particularly Hurley, who turned his head repeatedly because George was snapping his ears.
The result, I knew, was destined for national distribution. Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s had approached Champion immediately after we toppled the Mutes. From the photo, artists would create the steel engravings used in printing. Having his era’s Time and Newsweek already in line, Champion was eager to strike with others while we were hot. And just now we were very hot indeed.
I looked on in amusement. Everybody’s hair was brushed, Harry’s and Brainard’s whiskers were oiled, Gould’s mustache waxed. Collars were buttoned. Ornamental dickeys, each with scripted C, were on straight. George and Brainard sported cravats. George and Waterman wore their silver medallions awarded by the New York Clipper for leading their respective positions in hitting the previous season. They were posed in two rows, Harry sitting in the center foreground. Next to him Brainard held a ball, while Sweasy and Gould, on the ends, rested bats against their knees.
“You’re all so beautiful,” I said, mugging behind the photographer during his final countdown. When he turned around to hiss, Brainard brazenly flipped me off. We studied the matter later with a magnifying glass. Unfortunately the surreptitious finger did not record beyond the merest hint of a blur. History’s loss.
The tiny thatch-roofed frame house in which Andy had grown up sat on a dirt street lined with box elders. A pig wheezed in the shade of the porch. Several bony cows grazed in a side lot. Andy ushered me through the front door. The atmosphere inside was close and hot, with a stale cabbagelike odor.
It was obvious that I was a guest of honor and that such occasions were rare. Behind a table covered with patched linen and set with crockery and pewter, the Leonards waited in line to meet me.
Andy’s mother was tiny and birdlike, probably only in her fifties but ancient, her every movement tentative, as if she might take flight. Her rheumy eyes held mine with a quality of vague questioning as she repeated my name wonderingly and touched my hand.
Next was her brother Gavan, Andy’s uncle, stout and red-faced and bald as a bulb. He pumped my hand and greeted me in dense brogue, something that sounded like “G’aarf bray!” I managed to understand, with Andy’s help, that he’d taken off work early to see the celebrated nine engage in the glorious American game.
Andy’s sister Brighid was only in her midthirties. She was a hair taller than her mother and had Andy’s coloring, but gray already streaked her hair and crows’-feet bordered her light green eyes; she seemed weary, very weary. When I took her hand she blushed—and astonished me by dipping into a curtsy. I attempted to bow in response—my first ever—and it felt ridiculous. She explained apologetically that her husband couldn’t leave the factory where he worked, but the children were home. And so they were: four of them staring as if a fairy-tale giant had stomped into their home. I suppose I was a giant. Nobody there even matched Andy’s towering five six.
While he passed out gifts—the prodigal son come home—I looked idly at a bric-a-brac stand. A small wreath-shaped polychrome print caught my eye. On it were pictured eight men’s faces. They bore the names O’Brien, Grattan, Fitzgerald, and others. At the top was “Erin Go Bragh” and at the bottom, “Justice to Ireland.” In the center, on a field of green, appeared Erin herself—she resembled Columbia in militant feminism, but was probably plumper—garbed in flowing shamrock-bordered skirt and chain-mail doublet and trampling a prostrate English king. One shapely arm held a flag bearing the Irish harp; the other brandished a sword. She was nobody you’d want to mess with.
Beside the wreath was a framed twenty-dollar bond dated January 1866 and issued by an Irish “government in exile”; it bore portraits of Emmet and Tone flanking a bare-armed Hibernia exhorting what appeared to be a Union army soldier to take up the sword in Ireland’s cause.
Behind it was a small green flag with a sunburst in one corner. Gold letters spelled, “Newark 1st Regt. Irish Army of Liberation. Ridgeway & Fort Erie, June 2, 1866. Presented by the Fenian Sisterhood of New Jersey.”
I pondered all of that, recalling that I’d heard the term Fenian several times. Then my attention was caught by a group of miniatures; daguerreotypes, I thought. They included a steely-gazed, teenage Andy in a baseball jersey with PIONEERS across his chest; a younger Gavan grinning beneath a jaunty derby; an even younger Mrs. Leonard—God, she’d once been a dark-haired beauty!—on the arm of a smooth-shaven, smiling-eyed man I assumed to be Andy’s father. A studio logo told me the portrait had been made in Ballyjamesduff, wherever that was. I said the name silently as I stared at their faces, trying to imagine what their lives had been in that other land, that other time. My grandparents had kept only one picture of my father. It was a wedding picture. I had stared at it the same way. Who were you?
Then the last picture caught my eyes. Caught and impaled them. I tried later to sort out elements of the moment; I think my first discrete awareness was of the other eyes looking back: pale of iris, dark-lashed, metallic-seeming, gazing out at me.
Is it unusual to have an overwhelming sense of fatedness about an encounter? To feel from the very first instant that in some unfathomable way your existence is linked with another’s? What I’d felt before with Andy and Twain now seemed almost minor beside this new sensation.
In her features were traces of Andy and Brighid and Mrs. Leonard. She was young, probably in her teens, at the time of the portrait. And a beauty, no doubt about it, with dark hair piled high, a straight nose, lovely cheekbones, lips in a trace of a smile. There was a haughty quality to that smile, a hint of stubbornness in the tilted chin, a willfulness in the eyes, a sense that she knew well who she was and would not be undervalued. Not quite arrogance, but on the road to it.
And then abruptly a door wrenched open in my mind. The material of her dress was familiar. Beneath its high ruffled collar, enough of the bodice was visible that I could see the pattern: columns of flowerlike bows trailing long ribbons intermixed with clusters of leaves and rosebuds. In the untinted photograph the material was light gray. In my memory it was pale yellow, dotted with pinks and greens—the only such patch on Grandma’s quilt.
As my blood careened I tried to tell myself it was doubtless a popular design, had gone into any number of dresses and quilts. But I didn’t believe it. A patch of that fabric had somehow become part of the quilt I knew as a boy. I was certain of it. And finally I had found the clue I’d been seeking to explain why I had come back in time: to deal with the person in that daguerreotype.
“Everything hunky?” Andy touched my shoulder. The expression, which I thought stupid, came from the slogan of a breath freshener named Hunkidori. He teased me with it frequently.
I pointed. “Who is she?”
“That’s Cait, my other sis—”
Margaret!” said Mrs. Leonard sharply. It came out “Mair-ghread.”
“Mother, she doesn’t go by Margaret now.”
“We have no Caitlin,” said Mrs. Leonard firmly, pronouncing it “Cat-LEEN.” “Margaret’s the name my Andrew picked, God rest him”—she crossed herself—“and as Margaret she was baptized in Holy Mother Church.”
Andy stared at the floor.
“‘Twas only weeks before her marriage that the lovely portrait was made,” chirped Mrs. Leonard.
Andy started to speak, then checked himself.
Marriage? Was a message intended? I turned reluctantly from the photograph. I wanted to steal it.
Time was short before we had to leave for the game. With long-handled utensils Brighid served pork and “praties” from iron pots suspended in the high open fireplace that had blackened the walls on either side. Gavan’s spirited jeremiad on inflation accompanied the meal. I understood him better by then. Later I tried to reproduce a sample of his brogue in writing:
When we first landed, yer honner, I made divil a cint but four dollars a week and find mesilf. But it was aisy livin’ in a manner of spakin’, as the troublesome prices din’ keep eleva-tin’ higher each time a soul turned aroun’. Be jaber, they’ll soon drain all o’ me heart’s blood!
Charmed by the lilt of it, I found myself following sounds and rhythms more than words. But I paid attention when Mrs. Leonard announced, “General O’Neill stopped in to pay his respects with that handsome Captain O’Donovan”—Andy stiffened in his chair—“close by ’im, as ever. Sure an’ they’re two noble samples of manhood, Andy. The captain said that he was watching over Margaret, out in the West.”
O’Donovan. The name resonated strangely in me.
“I wish he’d leave her the hell alone.”
“Your tongue, Andy!” She crossed herself. “The leadership’s travelin’ about the country these days,” she said. “Since the St. Patrick’s circular from Head Center, it’s been speechifyin’ and money-raisin’.”
Andy said sharply, “You didn’t give away what I sent you, did you?”
She pursed her lips.
“Just a pittance of it, lad,” said Gavan. “It’s her joy, Andrew.”
“It’s a shameful scheme, is what it is!” He set his fork down with an impact. “They come sniffing in here and leave with—”
“Andy, don’t,” she wailed. “They’re strugglin’ for our homeland. Yes, yours as well—if ye’d but know it!”
“Even the Church can’t stomach ’em,” he said maliciously. “The whole lot’re to be excommunicated.”
“But it hasn’t been done yet, has it?” she retorted, her tone equally spiteful.
“Mother, our lives are here now. We’re not going back to Ireland. I’d like for it to be free, same as you, but I don’t think it’ll come by throwin’ parades and wearin’ emerald sashes and epaulets and phoenixes and sunbursts and shamrocks, and makin’ endless speeches. I send money to you, for the family.”
“You’re a fine one to talk, with your fancy pantaloons and shameful stockings!” Her voice choked with sobs. “I want to go home, my work’s done. You’re the last one—and somebody I scarcely know. I don’t want a life here, as you call it. I want to be with my Andrew, lyin’ in the sweet ground beside him.”
There was embarrassed silence.
Andy said tensely, “We shouldn’t do this, with my friend here.”
“Sure, an’ as it is I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “But ’tis God’s truth I’m not long for this life, and it’s me wish, son, to go home.”
Andy looked wretched. Gavan shifted uncomfortably.
“There isn’t money, Ann,” he said softly. “The cost is divilish high. Even steerage’d require a year o’ me wages.”
“It’s me wish! Sister Clara Antonia told me—”
“Oh, no,” Andy interjected. “You’re feedin’ her again, too?”
“She has the gift—seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.”
“I’m sure she took the worm test for you,” he said sarcastically.
“No need of that,” she replied calmly. “Though it’s well known I gave it to every soul in this house. Small wonder the wee thing thrived with you!”
Andy threw up his hands in surrender.
“She said there’d come a deliverer. To release me from this life and send me to my Andrew—forever.”
“Fine,” Andy said wearily. “Did she offer to foot the expense?”
“That she didn’t.”
“Well, how about the society? Surely O’Neil’d jump to help a good Irishwoman in her time of need.”
She said nothing. Her eyes met mine across the table. For a moment they were not filmy. Something happened between us. It was as if she’d asked a specific silent question.
“Your daughter,” I said, fumbling for words. “Your other daughter . . . ?”
“Yes, my daughter,” she agreed, smiling vaguely. Her eyes were filmy again. The subject seemed concluded.
As we rode the horsecar east toward the township of Irvington, I asked Andy why his mother’s wish to return to Ireland upset him so much.
“Wouldn’t it rile you,” he answered, “if your mother wanted to leave, just when you were makin’ something of yourself? Something for everybody to be proud of? Here I’m the only one earnin’ money worth speakin’ of, and she thinks I’m playin’ a boy’s game instead of followin’ a trade.”
“Still, wouldn’t you send her back? If she really wanted it?”
He sighed. “I’ve come to believe it is her true desire.”
I changed the subject. “What was that about a worm and having the gift?”
“Old Cavan beliefs. The gift is healing—laying on hands and such—and prophesying. The worm test tells whether a child has the gift. When the worm’s placed in the hand and shrivels up, that signifies the child was born with the gift.”
“But she said it thrived in yours.”
He smiled ruefully. “Likely so.”
I asked him to tell me about his family. It turned out he’d known his father scarcely more than I knew mine.
“I was three,” he said. “All’s I recollect was him there, skin white as paper, laid out amongst us. Brighid lifted me up to see . . .”
. . . lying alone, beneath the pale light . . .
“. . . women keenin’ and cryin’, men drinkin’ from jugs. . . . And that’s all I can remember. Next we was on the boat, everybody moaning and throwing up.”
“Coming here?”
“Yes, and lucky too. By then, ’forty-nine, a million had died. Blight set in, and the praties—’taters—failed three straight years. Folks swarmed to cities and died in the streets. We tried to hang on. Father wouldn’t hear of leaving the land. But conacres—wee parcels he rented out—stood vacant. Finally our crops failed too, and since the linen mills and gypsum mines had closed long before, the game was up.”
“What part of Ireland?”
“County Cavan, near Swanlinbar. Hills and lakes. Father couldn’t leave. He died of heartache—and of whiskey bein’ cheaper than meat.”
. . . like putting a gun to his head . . .
Andy’s tone lightened. “Old Hickory’s folks lived in County Antrim, near us. I’m named for him, in fact. Andrew Jackson Leonard, same as my father.”
“I’ll be damned.” I nearly told of Grandpa naming me Samuel Clemens. Instead I said, “What happened after he died?”
“Mother and Gavan sold the land for pennies—barely enough to cross in steerage. By the time we set foot at Castle Garden, Liam, my wee brother, was dead of consumption. Gavan found work as a tanner in Newark, so that’s where we went. Not too many Irish there yet, though Sweaze’s folk lived near. We had to learn the new ways quick. I had the easiest time, bein’ the youngest. Mother never changed a lick, Irish to the core. Even Brighid’s still a good half Old Soil.”
“What about . . . Cait?”
He paused so long that I wondered if he were going to answer. “She’s in Cincinnati.”
My heart did a funny little beat. “So you’re close?”
“These years we haven’t a great deal to say to each other.” A tired sound came from him. “It’s a sadness for me.” Again he was silent.
“What exactly are Fenians?”
He looked at me. “Why?”
“Well, you and your mother disagree about them. Also, somebody said it was Fenian money that McDermott lost at the Haymaker game.”
“They’re tryin’ to get a free Irish nation,” he said slowly, as if threading through a complex subject. “Over here it’s called the Fenian Society, but it’s properly the American wing of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood.”
I envisioned TV-screen images: IRA youths fasting . . . howling, rock-throwing mobs choking Ulster streets . . . Tommies in armored cars . . . bomb-blast carnage. . . .
“A terrorist group?”
“You’re talkin’ Dutch, Sam.”
“You know, operating in secret, using violence.”
“Well, in Ireland they tried to be secret—but now they’re all in jail. Over here they’ve been in the open all along, marching in their green uniforms and holding picnics and benefits to raise cash.”
“Sounds tame enough.”
“Well, they did invade Canada three years back.”
I looked to see if he was joking. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why’d they do that?”
“Intended to work a ransom game. Give England back its territory after Ireland was free.”
“Andy, are you kidding me?”
“Rumors have ’em trying it again soon. Read the papers, you’ll see.”
“Isn’t that pretty farfetched?”
“I dunno, Sam, tens of thousands of Irish boys fought in the war. On both sides. They’re trained troops—that’s what Fenian means in the old legends; from Fianna, for ‘soldier’—and most still have their service weapons. In ’sixty-six, all trains runnin’ north to the border were suddenly full of armed men.”
“What did the government do?”
“Steered clear and let the Canucks handle it. Which they did, once the surprise wore off. But the society claims it’ll be proper organized next time.”
“How could we just steer clear?”
“Easy. England ain’t ’zactly the cheese, you know, since they helped the Johnnies.”
For some reason I had the sudden shocking realization that the nation wasn’t even one hundred years old. There were people—many people—who carried vivid memories of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. Incredible.
“Irish votes carry weight now,” Andy continued. “Politicians’re anxious not to rile us.”
“Okay, but stand by and let part of the population—an immigrant army, at that—invade a neighbor country?”
“Governments can’t control everything.”
“If McDermott lost Fenian money,” I said, changing tack, “he must be in trouble. But how’d he get it in the first place? Is he one of them?”
“No, but he lays in stores for ’em—stores not easily come by, if you take my meaning. Word is he’s trusted by General O’Neill. Sits in on the councils in New York, privy to the inside workin’s.”
“How’d he manage that?”
“Dunno. He come out of the war with a medal—nobody knows for what—and puffed himself hard. For my money he’s a chin artist and crooked as a crutch.”
“What about the O’Donovan your mother mentioned? The one who came visiting with General O’Neill.”
“He’s O’Neill’s chief of operations. Mean-tempered as an adder and short as piecrust. Even McDermott wouldn’t want to cross him.”
“And yet he takes care of your sister?”
Andy looked at me silently for a good ten seconds. “Sam, I can tell you’re freezin’ to know about Cait. I saw you studyin’ that old picture.”
“Well, okay, why won’t anybody talk about her?”
“Me’n her were close once, the two youngest. Now we don’t get along.
“But the whole family avoided talking about her.”
“Cait’s gone her own way.”
“Well, if it’s too painful . . .”
“Sam, I see how you came to be a newspaper feller.” He slapped his leg in frustration. “You can’t stop pumping!”
I laughed and said I’d ease up.
“No, I’ll spill, but there’s a lot to it. Goes back to just before the war, about when that picture was made. Cait was bein’ sparked by John O’Neill’s nephew, Colm, who’d never liked the name Margaret and so called her Cait. She’d loved Colm since they was little kids. They were set to marry. But when the fighting started, Colm took it into his head to fight for the Union like his uncle, then a cavalry lieutenant. Irish lads were pouring into the armies by the tens of thousands. Course, many didn’t have a choice, as they hadn’t cash enough to buy a substitute in the draft. Still, signin’ on was the thing to do. Colm joined Meagher’s Irish Brigade.”
“How’d Cait feel about it?” I asked.
“Oh, she was dead against it. Said it wasn’t his country, nor his fight. But Colm was a charmer, could talk anybody into anything. He had his way.”
“What happened?”
“He got killed.” Andy’s tone was flat. “At Antietam. Holding the green regimental flag up even in death, we were told—though I always thought that part was malarkey.”
I felt a strange tumble of emotions, a sense that things existed just beyond my understanding: dream wisps tantalizingly near consciousness.
“It changed Cait like day to night. She’d taken care of me as far back as I remember. But after Colm’s death she didn’t care about me anymore. Or anything else, exceptin’—”
“Wait a second,” I said, charged with currents of excitement. “Didn’t your mom say the portrait was taken before her marriage?”
“There wasn’t none.” Andy looked at me. “Cait had Colm’s baby, but there was never a marriage.”
“Had his baby? You mean, after . . . ?”
“A boy, born seven months after Colm died. Soon as the war ended, John O’Neill came around spreadin’ the same old blarney. ’Cept now he was a Fenian general and instead of savin’ the Union it was savin’ Ireland. The war had all been a big training ground. Now all the boys that wasn’t dead or maimed would have a go directly at the big thing—a free Ireland.”
“Was that supposed to console Cait?”
“I don’t know what happened between ’em directly,” Andy said.
“But O’Neill was part of what changed her. She got a new purchase on life, a partial one anyhow. Along with the baby she had the Fenians. Took to ’em like religion.”
“So that Colm hadn’t died in vain?”
“That’s my guess. She’d carry on his work, so to speak.” He gave me a shrewd glance. “You’re some quick.”
“I gather you didn’t think much of it.”
“Mother sided with her, long as they’d pretend she was married. But I fought Cait every step, arguin’ that the family came first, that she’d already given up enough; but she acted like I wasn’t talking to her at all. Finally she moved out. And by then even Mother realized how far it’d gone—too far to ever change back. So we lost her.”
“I’m sorry, Andy.”
“Makes me sick. The politicians speechify, the generals make battle plans, the old women sew and give their pennies, the boys rush out to die, and the girls they marched off from ain’t never the same.”
I tried to think of comfort to offer.
“Colm was a fine lad,” he said softly. “I looked to him as my hero. Cait was lively and vital and laughed so sweet it’d make your heart jump to hear her.” He took a slow breath. “Well, she still looks enough like the girl you were studying’ so close, Sam. But now she never laughs, not even with her son. And I don’t care how many glorified speeches they make, Colm died like an animal led to slaughter.”
My vision danced oddly. McDermott. . . O’Neill. . . O’Donovan . . . Cait. What was it about the confluence of those names that stirred a vague dissonance in me? “O’Donovan takes care of her and the boy now?”
“So Mother thinks,” he said. “They work in the Fenians together is all I know. O’Donovan was Colm’s pal, though most of us couldn’t see why Colm let him be around so much. They went off to war together. It was O’Donovan who brought back the tale of the flag. I never fancied him, even before. I never liked the way he eyed Cait. But she’s gone his way, not the family’s.”
I rubbed my eyes and saw the portrait again in my mind: the dark hair tumbled on her head; the lips with an echo of a smile; the prideful glint of something—mischief? challenge?—in her eyes. It was hard to imagine her perpetually somber.
“She’s never married, then?”
“No, nor likely to; that part of Cait’s sealed up.”
“She must still be nice to look at.”
“You’re not the first to be taken with her looks, friend Sam.”
Maybe so, I thought, but how many had grown up in another century with a piece of her dress on their quilts?