Irish Love Page 8

  “He is the one who is informing on the Myles Joyce bunch, accusing them of murder? Does Mr. Bolton know that?”

  “He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Anthony and his two brothers are already called, ‘independent and unreproachable witnesses.’”

  “Men who might be settling a grudge?”

  “You got it, lad.”

  “I’ll try to keep it straight.”

  “To complicate things even more, there are two Casey families—Big John Casey, who is the most prosperous man around here, and Little Tom Casey who is also well enough off. They get along with one another well enough, though their relatives have complicated relations with the various Joyce clans. That bothers Little Tom, whose son Young Tom is one of the accused, but Big John doesn’t give a damn.”

  “Three Joyce families—John is dead along with his own immediate family, Myles and his allies stand accused by Anthony and two of his friends. Two Casey families involved to some extent with one or the other factions—Big John and Little Tom and Little Tom’s son Young Tom is accused.”

  “You have the right of it, lad.”

  I went back into the hut, fought down my gorge this time, and tried to listen.

  “So what will you report to the coroner’s jury, Doctor?” Mr. Bolton asked in a supercilious tone.

  I now had the presence of mind to start scribbling in my notebook.

  “Premeditated murder by person or persons unknown.”

  “You think one person could have committed this abominable crime, Doctor?”

  “That is up to the police to discover, sir. I will report my opinion to the jury the day after tomorrow.”

  “Very good, Doctor … Chief Superintendent Doyle, I believe you are in charge now that you have finally arrived. Would you please tell that rabble outside that they can have their corpses tomorrow morning to dispose of them as they see fit.”

  “Yes, Mr. Bolton … Sergeant Finnucane, would you please translate for me into the natives’ language?”

  “Don’t any of them speak any English?” I asked my new friend.

  “Some of the younger people who have been to the National School have a bit of it. An occasional older person understands it, lad. This is a foreign country out here.”

  Another line for the story I would file.

  I trailed them out of the hut. The wailing stopped.

  “The doctor has finished his work. His opinion is that Margaret, Breige, and Peggy Joyce were murdered, as were John Joyce and Michael Joyce. You may collect the bodies tomorrow morning to dispose of as you see fit. The police investigation will continue.”

  There was a slight stir in the silent mass of natives.

  Tommy Finnucane translated it all into Irish—a savage language, perhaps, but a singularly melodic one.

  As soon as he was finished, the keening, which is what they call the wailing, began anew. It sounded like a cry from the depths of hell. Men were passing bottles of a clear white liquid to one another.

  I wished that I were home on North Park Avenue in Chicago, safe within the confines of family warmth. All my dreams of manliness in time of crisis had been dashed the first day of my adventure.

  “Some will go home,” Tommy told me. “Others will stay all night. There’ll be a lot more for the burial tomorrow.”

  “Will there be a requiem Mass tomorrow?”

  “Not very likely. Way out here is no priest country.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that.

  “They’re Catholic, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, they are that all right. Look at the women with their rosaries. Catholics in their own way. Masses cost money, and they don’t have any money.”

  Then I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever observed in my life. She was tall and graceful, with black hair and a glorious young body. She stood erect and proud as if in this rabble of near slaves she was a free woman, come what may. She was tolling her rosary beads, her lips moving in prayer. Tears were slipping down her sad and lovely face. She was not keening, however. Somehow, she held herself aloof from this old custom. One hand rested on the arm of a stocky man next to her, doubtless her husband.

  My romantic dreams, I told myself, were folly. Still, she was so elegant as to linger in my imagination, a countess perhaps, lost in a world that was not really hers. Now both cowardice and concupiscence possessed me.

  We walked back towards Letterfrack as the sun began to slip towards the distant ocean. Blessedly the temperature fell rapidly, and a sea breeze stirred the air.

  “You had information for me, Mr. Bolton?” Roderick Doyle asked the prosecutor.

  “I do indeed, sir. Your local men have been very effective, for which I congratulate you. They have information received,” he winked at the superintendent “from eyewitnesses to the crime. These eyewitnesses heard the criminals abroad last night and followed them to the scene of the crime. They heard the cries and the shouts from inside John Joyce’s house. They are willing to testify in exchange for British coin.”

  Next to me, Tommy Finnucane sighed and whispered a single word: “Informers.”

  “How many killers?”

  “Ten men, sir. Three of whom went into the house and did the actual killing. I suggest that you interview the witnesses in the morning and have your forces arrest the criminals before the day is over. Would that we could resolve all the murders out here so easily.”

  “Indeed, Mr. Bolton.”

  Somehow I thought that Doyle was less enthusiastic than he should have been. Perhaps he shared Sergeant Finnucane’s skepticism about informers.

  In my small room, in an inn in Letterfrack, I wrote fly story, then brought it over to the telegraph office. The operator was preparing to shut down for the night when I appeared. He glanced over my message, nodded thoughtfully, and began to dispatch it to the Chicago Daily News.

  What a remarkable world we live in, I thought, when you can send a message from this foreign and savage land to Chicago almost instantly. Then I came back here and scrawled out my feelings. I will not even try to reread them tonight. Or ever.

  Much later.

  As the sun was setting at the end of the long August day and I was preparing for bed, there was a respectful knock at my door.

  “Sergeant Finnucane, sir.”

  I opened the door.

  “Yes, Tommy?”

  “I wonder, lad, and yourself being a journalist, whether you’d like to come to the wake. I expect they’re different out here from anything you might see in the States.”

  All I wanted to do was to go to bed and blot out the miseries of the day with a few hours of sleep. I was a journalist, however, and must live up to the solemn and serious obligations of my profession.

  “Thank you very much, Tommy. I’d like very much to see the wake.”

  “You better take your coat, Eddie. It’ll be cool with the sun going down.”

  We hiked up the mountain in the moonlight. The air was still. From a long way off I heard the keening.

  “Have the bodies been released?”

  “Not till tomorrow.”

  “How can they have a wake without a body?”

  “They’ll be outside around the corpse house. It’s not the usual way, but there must be a wake.”

  “Strange.”

  “It’s all of that … . There’s been a new development, lad. Young Patrick Joyce has been laying in one of the outhouses since yesterday morning. He’s in terrible pain. One of our lads has been begging people to help him. They refuse to do so. The resident magistrates knew there was a doctor staying at the inn over in Outhergard He brought him here just a few hours ago. He said that the lad could live if he was given attention. Some of our lads carried him away.”

  “Why would they not help him?”

  “They’re afraid of something, perhaps that if Patsy lives maybe he’ll identify the killers, though he told our lads that he did not recognize the three men that came into the house because their faces were covered with d
irt.”

  “It seems heartless.”

  “They’re frightened. Still, they’ll all say thanks be to God if Patsy lives.”

  We came upon the wake scene. At least two hundred people were gathered outside the house in the eerie light of the full moon. The women, sitting for the most part in a semicircle, were either keening or smoking clay pipes. The men milled closer to the house, grim and silent as they passed around bottles of a clear liquid, which I gathered was something called poteen.

  “They aren’t talking much, Tommy.”

  “Not with police all around.”

  We walked into the crowd of men. They nodded at Tommy, but did not speak to him. He said a word or two in Irish to one of the men, who passed the bottle of poteen to Tommy, who in his turn gave it to me.

  “Take a sip, lad, so you’ll know what it’s like.”

  I took a sip and felt that someone might have blown off the top of my head. The man who had given us the bottle smiled slightly and said something to Tommy in Irish. I returned the bottle and thanked him.

  “He said you’re a game one, lad. In a few weeks you’d be drinking as well as the rest of them.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Liquor leads to both cowardice and concupiscence.

  “See that stocky man over there with the young wife?”

  “The woman who’s saying the rosary?”

  “The very one … . The man is Myles Joyce.”

  “Does he know he’s accused?”

  “I’m sure he does not. Yet, he’s certainly a dead man.”

  I shivered.

  8

  August 21, 1882

  Today began even warmer than yesterday. I ate a slice of toast and drank a pot of weak tea for breakfast and then set out for the Royal Irish Constabulary hut. Even in the center of the town we heard the keening.

  “Pagan savages,” Mr. Bolton murmured. “Like an African tribe.”

  Superintendent Doyle did not reply.

  “If you ask me, it’s too bad that all of them didn’t die in the famine or migrate to America.”

  In my mind, I agreed that it was too bad that they all hadn’t migrated to America like my grandparents. Good journalist that I was—or hoped to be—I kept my mouth shut. I would, however, remember Mr. Bolton’s remark for possible later use.

  A huge crowd of people waited patiently outside the hut, the women keening, the men drinking. The young woman who had captured my heart was still saying her rosary. She seemed so very sad. Did she know that her husband was a dead man? The constables carried out the five bodies, now in shrouds, on boards. Men emerged from the crowd as if by prearrangement and shouldered the boards. Then they began to walk up the mountains slowly and solemnly.

  There was no priest to bless the bodies or to pray at the graves. Yet, somehow there was a touch of Catholicism in the solemnity of the march.

  I removed my rosary from my pocket and, despite Mr. Bolton, prayed.

  The police lurked on the edges of the procession, watching carefully.

  “What are they doing, Tommy?”

  “They are getting ready if there’s a riot, which these poor folks are too hungry to do, and keeping an eye on the suspects.”

  Finally, we came to a level place. The ruins of an old church loomed over a scattered collection of stones. There were five empty graves, four in one place and another at some distance. This was a cemetery for poor people! Carefully, the pallbearers, if one could call them that, lowered the corpses into the ground.

  “’Tis called the Church on the Hill. They’ve been burying people up here for centuries. See that manor house at the edge of the cemetery? Lord Ballynahinch lived there for a while, till the local Ribbonmen and the Fenians made it too hot for him. He was before my time, but they all say he was a bit of a monster.”

  “The house is empty?”

  “Has been for twenty years. Occasionally someone comes over from England, looks at it, stays a couple of weeks in Letterfrack, and then decides to go home.”

  “Why the separate grave?”

  “It’s for Breige. They’re lying her next to her first husband, Tom O’Brien. Her marriage to John Joyce was a second for both of them. They both lost their spouses at about the same time. She was a fine looking woman. Peggy and the two boys were John’s children by his first marriage.”

  A big, handsome man with long black hair walked up to the first grave, picked up a shovel, and cast a first pile of dirt on the corpse. The pitch of the wail rose higher. He passed the shovel to another man, who did the same thing. One by one the men marched in procession from grave to grave until the last one had been covered. Some of the mourners placed rough stones at the head of each grave. There was a last prolonged wail of keening, and then the crowd dispersed, some down the mountain, some up the mountain.

  “Do they keen because they’re sad?” I asked Tommy Finnucane.

  “More like the opposite,” he said. “They keen, and that makes them sad. Most of the women will have recovered by teatime. Then they’ll take out their clay pipes and begin to smoke again.”

  “Have you been to the crime site, Mr. Bolton?”

  “I hardly think that is necessary, sir. We have our criminals. I believe one or two of your men are up there, however.”

  “I want to see it myself.”

  We walked up the mountain—Rod Doyle, Tom Finnucane, and myself. I felt miserable. Heavy heart and heavier stomach. Lonely, weary, sick. And very sorry for myself. I despised all of those emotions. I was in truth a coward, not an adventurer. I’d never be anything else.

  Romantic indeed.

  Clouds raced in rapidly from the Atlantic. Heat yielded to damp. Drizzle started when we reached the house of the murder. Gloom hovered over us like an impending plague.

  “House” is too strong a word. The blood-splattered hovel was little more than a cave, with stone walls extending from the walls of the cave and wood beams supporting a thatched roof. A few pathetic outhouses clustered around it.

  “It wouldn’t seem that stealing sheep is a very profitable occupation in this part of Ireland,” I exclaimed.

  Doyle glanced at me quickly and then looked away.

  “Nothing is very profitable around here, Eddie. Nothing. They manage to stay alive and produce children. Only just barely … Yet why so much violence?”

  I felt rebuked, a fool once again.

  “The drink,” Tommy Finnucane muttered.

  “Aye, the drink.”

  “Hatred,” I plunged in again. “Hatred so great that it was necessary to kill John Joyce and his whole family with as much brutality as possible.”

  “And themselves all relatives up here too, eh, Tommy?”

  “Still, Chief, this one is unusual.”

  The Superintendent sighed heavily.

  “A lot more unusual than Mr. Bolton seems to think … Well, we’ve seen enough. Let’s go back to the police hut.”

  I was soaking wet when we finally stumbled into the hut, buffeted by rain and fierce winds. I sat by a peat fire trying to dry out. I should go back to my room in the inn, I thought, write a dispatch, and sleep the rest of the day.

  “Here’s the story, Eddie.” Tom Finnucane sat on the floor next to me with a diagram. “If the story the ‘independent’ witnesses tell is the truth, seven of the killers, who lived east of the John Joyce house, went out of the houses here, walked down to the other end of the valley to collect Myles Joyce and his cousins down there at the west end, and came back here to the John Joyce house in between to do the killing. They did this making enough noise on the road to wake Tony and his other witnesses, but not to disturb anyone else. Moreover, the witnesses claim to have followed them along that wandering path for several hours, hiding behind bushes and outhouses and never once were spotted by the killers.”

  “That seems impossible, Tom. Do you think the informers are lying?”

  He hesitated.

  “Not to say lying, lad, just adding to the truth a li
ttle more than is required. They probably heard the crowd carousing through the valley and made up the story. They don’t know who went into the house and did the killing. So they’re not really accusing anyone … . The lad that survived, Patsy Joyce, says that the three men who did the killing had dirt on their faces, so he can’t identify them. The informers figure they’ll earn a few English pounds and do no real harm to anyone. Moreover, they’ll even the score with Myles Joyce. They may even have had a pretty good idea who the real killers might be and put them on their list of ten. They don’t know how Mr. Bolton works.”

  “Does anyone know who really killed John Joyce and his family?”

  “Everyone in the valley knows except us.”

  “What!”

  “The women know which husbands were in their beds that night and which weren’t. They talk to one another. The men know what plans were whispered around the last two weeks. They talk. The valley has already solved the crime.”

  “And they won’t come forward?”

  “No one ever comes forward to English law.”

  “Not even to save the lives of those they love?”

  “They don’t believe that it would do any good. Most of the older ones speak only Irish. They’re afraid even to talk to English law. They’re in terror of the real killers, if any of them are not on the list the informers turned in. Moreover, they have to live with each other for the years ahead. They’ll tell themselves there is enough hatred already. They really can’t believe that the English will hang men who are not really guilty. Like I say, they don’t know the way Mr. George Bolton works. By the time they find out it will be too late.”

  “You mean that he really doesn’t care whether he arrests the innocent or the guilty?”

  “He cares about making arrests and getting convictions.”

  “Innocent men might hang for this crime?”

  Tommy sighed.

  “Probably not, lad. Probably not.”

  “What happens next?”

  “We arrest the suspects and transport them to the jail in Galway Town. I’m supposed to take four men and arrest Myles Joyce, the dead man’s cousin.”