A Passionate Girl (6 page)

“The second saddest was the day I came home to Pulaski. I'd known what was happenin' in Tennessee. The state split up, the east end goin' with the Union, the west with the Confeds. In Middle Tennessee, where we were, people split off both ways. That made for a mean war, sometimes brothers from the same family goin' on opposite sides. Old friends turnin' enemies. But I never expected what I saw when I got off the train. Our tavern, our house, just heaps of burnt-out timbers. A Union mob'd done it, right after the Union Army come through, in 1862. Dad never told me. He figured I had enough trouble of my own. Then the Union politicians went to work on him. They dragged him in front of some court and convicted him of being a traitor and confiscated our horse farm, our sawmill, everything we owned. It broke Dad's spirit. He died just before the war ended. His friends had to bury him with borrowed money.”

“Dear God, Dan, what you've been through,” I said. “How did you come to the Fenians?”

“I didn't have a cent. A friend of Dad's sent me to John O'Neil, in Nashville. He was a Union officer, a cavalryman, runnin' a pension agency for the Yankee army and recruitin' Fenians on the side. He said I was just the sort of man they wanted and sent me to New York.”

We were alone on the
Manhattan
's bow as Dan told me this story. My heart swelled with a great pity for him, as well as a kind of awe. He was only twenty-five years old, but he had seen more death and tasted more bitterness than most men of fifty. No wonder he dreamt of a great estate in Ireland if we were victorious. Life had raised him up and cast him down. Without the Fenians he would have to go back to where his father had begun, toiling at hard labor for a few dollars a day. How could I find fault with him when I compared my soft safe life with his perils and sufferings? I put my arms around him and vowed to love him more wholeheartedly.

“'Tis time surely for your luck to turn,” I said. “And with it, Ireland's. You may be a good luck charm, without knowing it.”

“You're the first piece of good luck I've had in a long time, Bess,” he said. “In fact, you're too good to be true.”

“I'm true as the oak of this deck,” I said, stamping my foot on the solid wood. “Will you be?”

I said the words lightly, but my mind flashed to the broken promise to the woman at Priest's Leap. For a moment a darkness fell on his face, as if he sensed what I was thinking. But he only laughed and kissed me and said, “What do you think?”

Later that day, I climbed into the rigging to contemplate the sea from the crow's nest. For this kind of exercise, I wore my sailor's costume. High above the water, I gazed at the world's immensity and felt very small. I thought of Dan's story and brooded on how little we controlled our lives.

I was so absorbed, I scarcely noticed the arrival of my brother. He had a similar fondness for this perch. Dan, on the other hand, seldom joined me here. He disliked heights. They gave him “the creeps,” he said, an American word that needed no translation.

“Are you going to marry him?” Michael said.

“If he asks me,” I said.

“What if I ask him?”

“I'll have your head,” I warned him. “I haven't gone through the grief of defying Father, for all my love of him, to discover another father in you. Contrary to your assumption, the mere fact that I'm female and you're male gives you no authority over me.”

“He's not worthy of you, Bess. He has no education, no spirit but that of a mercenary.”

“If you knew his life, you wouldn't be so quick to find fault,” I said, and told him the story of Dan's past. It shamed him into temporary silence, but he refused to change his mind.

“Remember how the song ends, Bess,” Michael said.

“What song?” I said, trying to pretend I had no idea what he was talking about.

“‘Donal Ogue,'” he said, and recited the final verse.

“It won't end that way,” I said. “God won't let it.”

How strange it was, that while I was sinning my soul and defying my father and the precepts of the Catholic Church, I remained convinced that I was doing a holy thing to risk my salvation to free Ireland. Revolutionaries are strange creatures, and Irish revolutionaries perhaps the strangest of all.

That night, Dan bought a bottle of John Jameson's from Captain O'Hickey and got drunk. It was the kind of drinking I had never seen before, a dark plunge into whiskey as a kind of oblivion, without laughter or pleasure. But it loosed his tongue to speak to me for the first time with his feelings. Even when he took me in his arms, he said little by way of endearment. He never used the word “love.” “You're a beauty, Bess,” he would murmur. He let me do all the talking about love.

Now, as he reached the bottom of the bottle, he looked at me and shook his head. “Go 'way, Bess. When we get to New York, go 'way from me. I specialize in lost causes. Always on the losin' side. This thing—Ireland—losin'. There's nothin' there, Bess. No spirit. No hope.”

“'Tis my cause more than yours,” I said. “You can't tell me to go away from it. Any more than you can tell me to stop loving you.”

“Lovin'—me?” He shook his head. “You keep sayin' that. You don't know what you're talkin' about. I haven't got a dime, Bess. Girl like you—can get anyone she wants, almost.”

“I've got the only one I want,” I said, putting my arms around him. His obsession with money, with his poverty, both touched and appalled me.

At this moment bad fortune brought Michael into the cabin. “Excuse me,” he said with heavy sarcasm when he saw my arms around Dan.

A lopsided grin on his face, Dan lurched to Michael and threw his arm around him. “I'm tryin' to tell your crazy sister to stop lovin' me. You agree?”

“Definitely,” Michael said.

“Whaaat?” Dan said. “You jokin'?”

“I am not,” Michael said, with a courage that was close to madness, considering Dan's size and strength. “I'd like to see you part. I think you're ill-matched.”

The arm of friendship around Michael's shoulder suddenly became a vise of rage. Dan seized the back of the collar of Michael's shirt and flung him across the cabin. His head struck the wooden bulkhead with a sickening crack. Dan lunged after him, his fist held high.

I caught his arm, crying, “He didn't mean it, Dan.”

He shook me off as if I were a fly, but I dodged past him and threw myself in front of Michael, who was crumpled against the wall, groaning and holding his head.

“Will you strike me first?” I said.

“What kind of a goddamn game are you two playin' with me?” Dan snarled.

For a moment I thought he might kill us both. I saw nothing but blind drunken hatred on his face. All trace of the buoyant, reckless warrior had vanished. He looked old, with his eyes squeezed and his mouth clenched; old or possessed of some evil spirit. I shuddered, remembering the curse the woman had laid on us at Priest's Leap.

“We're playing no game,” I said. “Go to bed now, and tomorrow we'll laugh at it all. Michael spoke without thinking. It doesn't alter in the least my feeling for you.”

Two lies in one breath, I thought. But Dan lowered his fist, seized his bottle, and lurched out of the cabin onto the dark deck. I put Michael to bed with a cold cloth on his forehead and the next day forced him to shake hands with Dan. Neither displayed much enthusiasm for the gesture, but it was done in a manly way on both sides. I hoped that I had buried the enmity. It was just as well that I did not know it was a bitter seed and burying it meant only a later and more terrible harvest.

The next day, we sighted several ships on the southern passage to the West Indies. Captain O'Hickey said it meant that we were drawing near New York. Dan began preparing a report of what he had found in his journey through Ireland. There was not much good news in it. Although the Fenians had been secretly organizing for three or four years, they did not have more than ten thousand members. The movement was built around the local circles led by a center. Many circles had lost membership recently. In some cases, the center himself had quit. Few of the circles had guns. When they met, they spent most of their time talking about revolution and little of it in drilling. What worried Dan most was the lack of strength in the countryside. The active circles were in cities like Limerick and Dublin. But Ireland was a country of villages. Most of the people lived upon the land. Dan lamented the crushed and fearful state of the peasantry, almost all of them terrified at the thought of arousing the landlord's wrath.

“I remember the stories my father told me about Mayo—the Molly Maguires had the whole county paralyzed,” Dan said. “Anyone who evicted a farmer or arrested a man for debt wound up with his throat cut or his cattle maimed. What happened to them?”

“They're all in America,” Michael said. “Or in Australia or Canada. I've heard my father talk of the Mollies. They were the poorest of the poor, fellows with nothing to lose. Those that didn't die in the great famine of '48 fled the country.”

“Mollies, Ribbonmen, Lady Clares, Whiteboys,” Captain O'Hickey said. “They had different names in the different counties. But they weren't revolutionaries. All they thought to do was protect their own little bit of soil.”

“With all due respect for your father,” Michael said to Dan, “I think he was exaggerating the Mollies. Distance and time tend to expand the imagination at the expense of the memory. You can't blame the peasantry. They see no leaders but the parish priest, whose bishop tells him to damn all revolutionaries, and men like my father, who have taken the King's shilling, in his case from honest conviction.”

Far from lending enchantment, the more we looked at Ireland from a distance, the more difficult our task became. We were in far from sanguine spirits as we approached the American coast.

Soon after the continent became a brown blur on the horizon, we were hailed by a steam tug. “
Manhattan
ahoy,” shouted a man in the bow, wearing a gaudy checked suit. “Are you the ship with the Fenians aboard?”

“What business is it of yours?” boomed Captain O'Hickey through his trumpet.

“I'm Pickens of the
Herald,
” was the answer. “Let me come aboard. I'm here to get their story.”

Captain O'Hickey came about as promptly as if Pickens had fired a shot across our bow. A rope ladder was flung down. Pickens leaped from the tug with the agility of a monkey and scrambled to the deck. He had a small, narrow face that seemed as innocent as a child's until you noticed his eyes. They flickered like the eyes of a bird, up, down, around, missing nothing.

“George Pickens is the name, folks,” he said “I'm here by order of my editor, James Gordon Bennett. I've been cruising back and forth every day for a week to get your story. Where's the Fenian girl? This must be her, unless they're making sailors a lot different from the standard model these days.”

He gazed at me for a moment, then made a smacking sound with his lips, as if he were contemplating a good dinner. “I don't know about your friends, but we're going to make you famous.”

We were totally amazed. “How do you know anything about us?” Michael asked.

“The British papers wrote you up—or down, to be more exact. They arrived in New York by steamship ten days ago. We want exclusive rights to your story. How much is it worth to you?”

“Worth?” I said dazedly. “What do you mean?”

“I'll give you a hundred dollars each now and another hundred tomorrow if you promise to refuse to talk to any other reporter for twenty-four hours.”

“That's twenty pounds,” Michael said. It was a fortune in Ireland, more money than most farmers could clear in a year.

“A hundred dollars U.S. currency, greenbacks of Uncle Sam,” Pickens said. He yanked a wad of money out of his pocket and began to peel off bills.

“It's a deal,” Dan McCaffrey said, and held out his hand. Pickens counted three bills, each worth a hundred dollars, into it. He turned to O'Hickey and handed him an identical bill. “I'd appreciate it, Captain, if you ignored any other ship that hailed you. These people are the talk of New York. A lot of other reporters will be looking for them.”

We went into the main cabin, and Pickens asked us dozens of questions about our escape from Ireland. We told him the truth, and he was shocked by some of it. “The honest farmer betrayed you? I thought Ireland was united to a man behind the Fenians,” he said.

He also seemed disappointed that neither Michael nor I had shot anyone. “You're sure you didn't use Dan's gun, especially in the fight on the cliff?” Pickens asked.

“Why should we do something so foolish? I've never fired a gun in my life,” I said. “Our lives depended on Dan making every bullet count.”

“Ireland needs a Joan of Arc,” he said. “You could be it.”

I was too astonished to answer him. He asked Dan what he thought of the Fenians' chances of success in Ireland. Dan told him the dolorous truth. Again Pickens was annoyed. “Only ten thousand Fenians in Ireland? Over here they're talking about two hundred thousand.”

Pickens took me to the bow and sketched me on a pad he carried in his coat, reminded us of his promise to pay another three hundred dollars if we kept silent, and hailed his steam tug, which had been plowing alongside us while we talked. The moment he stepped aboard, the tug's engines began pounding mightily; smoke gushed from its funnel, and it was soon far ahead of us on the way to New York harbor. We watched him go, not quite able to believe our good fortune, as it seemed to us then.