Killing Down the Roman Line (7 page)

Corrigan noted that. “You’ve seen these before, Jim?”

“Not since I was a kid.”

Travis spun to his dad, more shock in his eyes. “You knew about this?” He turned back to Corrigan, a million questions tripping out of his mouth at once. “Who are they?”

“Corrigans all. My family.”

“Why are they buried here and not in the cemetery?” The boy kept blinking and blinking.

“Come to the tour, son, and find out.”

“Tour?” Jim chinned the house, where the sign was. “Is that for real?”

“Very much.”

“What’s it about?”

Corrigan didn’t answer. He turned to the boy and put a hand on his shoulder. “Travis, do you have a job?”

“He has chores round the farm.”

Corrigan smiled at the boy. “Of course. But do you have a job outside of that? Part-time, after school?”

“No sir.”

“Do you want one? There’s plenty of work here. Demolition, smashing things up and whatnot. I’ll pay you for your time.” He nodded in deference to the father. “After your chores of course.”

Travis looked to his dad. Eager and willing. “Can I?”

“We’ll talk about it. We better get back.” Jim waved at his son to come along, then reached out to shake the man’s hand. “Good luck.”

“Thank you, Jim. And thank your wife for the invite. I’ll be around soon.”

Jim put a hand on Travis’s shoulder and led him around the side of the house to their truck. He glanced back once before turning the corner. Will Corrigan stood in the weeds, one arm propped on the scythe, watching them leave.

6

“A GRAVEYARD?” Emma held the bowl of mashed potatoes in the air, forgetting who had asked for it.

“For real.” Travis grinned, pleased that he had shocked her. “There’s like six of them buried up there. We saw it. Pass the bread.”

“Six?” Emma lowered the bowl.

“You didn’t know?”

“We used to tell ghost stories about that old place when we were kids. I always thought it was just tall tales.” Emma looked at Jim. “Did you know about the graves?”

Jim took the bowl from her. “I saw them once. Went out there exploring when I was Travis’s age and came running back. My old man gave me a whalloping for it. We weren’t supposed to go near the place. Pass the gravy, please.”

Travis perked up to hear that his dad had been forbidden from the old place too. Family tradition. He watched the bowls being passed around. His dad just tucked into his food like there was no more to be said. Unbelievable. “So what happened to them? The family?”

“Not sure.” Emma looked to Jim. “They were all killed, weren’t they?”

Jim shrugged but said nothing.

“By who?” Travis’s eyes darted from his mom to his dad and back. There was a hidden graveyard less than a quarter mile from their house and neither of them seemed to care. How could they be so lame? “Dad?”

“Convicts, I think. A gang of them busted out of the jailhouse over in Garrisontown, came through this way in their escape.”

Travis stopped eating altogether. “Then what? They just went after them?”

“Dunno. It was a hundred years ago.” Jim looked at the boy’s untouched plate. “This isn’t dinner conversation. Eat up.”

He mashed his potatoes, watching his parents. Forks clinking against the china, reaching for another biscuit. No other conversation came forth. Travis wanted to scream.

~

The Pennyluck Watchman
came out every third Thursday of the month. Twenty-eight pages of local news, sports and obits. The classified section ate the last ten pages of the
Watchman
, bartering everything from farm equipment to babysitting services within the tri-town area of Pennyluck, Exford and Garrisontown. Craigslist was for fools and perverts. If you needed it sold or bartered, you listed in the backpages of the
Watchman.

The offices of the
Watchman
were run from the back of Paul Tilford’s ‘Books and Souvenir’ shop over on Chestnut Street, kittycorner from the Farmer’s Co-op. Late Monday night, Tilford received a visitor asking about placing a three/eights ad in the classifieds. Tilford told the stranger that this month’s paper was being put to bed tonight and therefore too late to make the print run, but he’d be happy to book the ad for the next issue. That would make it the third week of July. The man regretted the lateness of his call but said the next issue would be too late. He needed his ad to run this week or not at all. Tilford smiled but explained that his hands were tied. The caller asked what his rate was for the space and, upon hearing the figure, offered double the amount for a late placement.

Tilford scrounged up a pencil and asked for the exact wording of his ad. Reworking the layout of the classified pages would take some overtime but the doubled rate would ease the pain.

The caller produced a large envelope and said he had already laid out the ad. Slipped from the envelope was a clean sheet of paper showing the ad, formatted and correct to the size. It could be cut and pasted into a layout board or simply scanned and fitted into place. Tilford smiled, knowing at a glance that half of his job was already accomplished.

Mr. Tilford smiled again when the man paid cash for his ad. They shook hands and the man left. He read through the copy, proofreading as he went along.

THE CORRIGAN HORROR!

Historical Tour and Attractions

Come visit the Corrigan homestead and be thrilled by a true tale of horror and intrigue. Learn the hidden secrets and shocking truths behind the murder of this noble clan and the founding of our pleasant community. All will be shocked, all will be amazed! Not for the timid!

No children under twelve will be admitted. Scenes of violence and depravity told. Bring a raincoat, there will be blood!

Sunday, 1:00 PM

~

“The Corrigan Horror? What the hell is that?”

Bill Berryhill leaned against his truck outside the diner, holding up the latest edition of the
Watchman.

Hitchens squinted at the ad, reading it for a third time like he had missed something. “Dunno. Some kind of tourist attraction, I guess.”

“To see what?” Berryhill snatched the paper back. “A rotting house?”

“Maybe it’s one of those haunted house things? A spook house like they put on at Halloween.”

“In June?”

The bell over the diner door rang as Kate came out onto the street. Eyes on her Blackberry, walking straight into Hitchens. “Oops,” she said. “Sorry.”

Berryhill thrust the paper at her. “Kate, what do you know about this?”

“No idea.” She had already seen the
Watchman
. “But if it brings in some tourist dollars, I’m all for it.”

“Did you see this?” All three turned to see Jim coming up the sidewalk, a copy of the newspaper in his hand.

“We seen it,” Hitchens said. “Do you know what the hell it is?”

“It’s about his family.” Jim saw the copy in Berryhill’s mitt. “The ones buried out there on the property.”

“Buried? The hell you talking about?”

“There’s a small graveyard out behind the house.” Jim rolled the newspaper into a tube and looked for somewhere to pitch it. “The Corrigan clan all died there.”

“Oh come on. That’s just an old spook tale.” Hitchens guffawed at him but Jim wasn’t smiling.

Berryhill swatted him. “You’re an ignorant bag of rocks, Hitch.”

Kate’s smile dropped as she looked at Jim. “Have you seen this graveyard?”

“They’ve been hidden under brush all this time. Corrigan’s cut back all the weeds so you can see ‘em.”

Berryhill spat onto the pavement. “So what’s this guy doing? Turning that shitty firetrap into Disneyland?”

“God knows.”

Kate scanned through the ad again. “Says here it starts Sunday. Anyone going?”

“Hell yeah,” said Hitchens. “Nothing new ever happens around here. You going, Jimmy?”

Jim tossed his paper into a bin. “I got better things to do.”

“Our Jim’s gonna be in church,” Berryhill laughed.

Jim ignored the oaf and walked back to his truck. Like Berryhill could talk, the man hadn’t seen the inside of a church since the day he was baptised. Even then he was trouble. Screaming blue bloody murder as Father Toohey poured holy water over his wee head, as if it burned.

~

Over the next two days Jim kept an eye on his new neighbour, watching the Toyota FJ roar away and come back in. Watching Corrigan unload lumber and supplies. The overgrown weeds and timothy choking the yard were mowed down and cleared away. Corrigan dragged the framed posts out to the end of the driveway and hammered the big signboard to it. It stood fourteen feet in the air, its neatly stencilled face declaring the site of ‘
The Corrigan Horror’
.

To Jim’s relief, the man never took them up on Emma’s invitation. No unannounced pop-in visit or borrowing of a cup of sugar. In town, the stranger was still the subject of endless speculation as to the veracity of his claims and his bogus stunt.

Friday night, Jim caught sight of a glow beyond the treeline and walked the halfacre to the stone fence. A clearing in the elm trees gave a clean sightline to the old Corrigan property. An enormous bonfire blazed on the front yard, the flames trailing up twenty feet into the night sky. The mound of trash and debris pulled from the interior burned up, spewing foul black smoke south to the creek. A hazy silhouette shimmered before the rippling flames, tossing more debris into the fire. Corrigan, no doubt. Jim watched the man feed the fire and stoke the flames like some evil hobgoblin intent on torching everything in sight.

7

SUNDAY. JIM OILED the chainsaw and took Travis to the eastern property line to clear away three dead trees that needed felling. Not an urgent task but he wanted to keep an eye on their neighbour and his attraction, or scam, or whatever it was. By noon they had felled all three trees and cut the trunks into logs, Jim letting his son have a go with the chainsaw. Not a single vehicle came up the road to the Corrigan property, no trail of dust disturbed the Roman Line this Sunday morning. Good. People had the good sense to stay away from the carpetbagger’s shenanigans. Emma came out to the yard and waved them in for lunch.

Eggs and salsa, toast with the last of the elderberry preserves. It was Travis who spotted the first car on the road, spoiling the pristine sky with its dust cloud. It was followed by two pickups and a minivan. Jim went to the window, surprised to see Puddycombe’s Cherokee turning into the Corrigan lot.

Damn.

“Are we going?” Travis looked up, hopeful.

“No.”

“Oh come on,” Emma said. “Let’s see what all the fuss is about.”

“Plain foolishness is what it is.” Jim turned away from the window, ending the matter.

Emma cocked her hip. “Aren’t you even a little bit curious?”

~

Jim counted nineteen cars, crowded ass to grill down the narrow rut and snaking back onto the road. Most of them he recognized. He, Emma and Travis had walked, it being such a warm day. He felt his wife’s hand slide into his, fingers meshing. He didn’t know what she wanted at first, it being so long since they’d held hands like that. For no reason. It felt good and he told her so with a little squeeze.

Travis walked ahead of them, eager to get there and groaning at his turtle-trodding parents. He caught them holding hands. “Do you have to do that? There’s people around.”

Coming onto the yard, they nodded to people milling about in the shorn crabgrass. Puddycombe and Hitchens leaned on Puddy’s truck while their wives talked nearby. The Ryder family next to Phil Carroll and his brood. Joe Keefe and his wife. Elaine and Bertie O’ Connor. The Murdy clan and Orlo Miller. Even Bill Berryhill was there, loafing with his little toadie ‘Kombat’ Kyle. Chinless under a downy moustache, Kyle was the local nazi wannabe enamoured with all things military. He wore camouflage and combat boots and never ever spoke.

Puddycombe spotted Jim and waved him over. “You know what this nonsense is all about?”

“No idea.” Jim surveyed the crowd, impatient but polite. “But I thoroughly expect it to be a scam.”

Hitchens laughed. “keep your hands on your wallets, boys—”

KA-BOOM!

The crack of a gunshot blast, the report echoing off into the field. Everyone jerked and ducked, shutting the hell up. All eyes swinging up to the sound.

William Corrigan stood on his tilting porch, a double-barrelled shotgun in his hand. The stock resting on a hip and smoke drifting from the twin bores. He mouth twisted into a satisfied grin.

“Good afternoon!” Corrigan roamed the faces staring back at him. Some still startled, others angry or offended. He grinned back at them, delighted with the effect. “And welcome to the Corrigan Horrorshow. Nice to see so many of you out today.”

He clomped down the dryrot steps to the crowd. Mrs. Murdy pulled her children away and stepped back. Donny McKinnon bubbled up, “What the hell’re you doing with the gun?”

“My name is William James Corrigan,” he hollered, shouting down the protests and clucking tongues. “The last of the Corrigan clan. And this crumbling shell before you is all that’s left of the family homestead.”

The crowd parted, stepping on one another’s toes as their host ferried forward. “Like most of you, my family emigrated here from Ireland. County Tipperary. My predecessors and yours alike. All fleeing the blight and the bastard landowners, the tithe troubles and the bloodshed of ancient feuds. Here to the New World where there was land for the taking, if you had the backbone to clear it. Land you could own, something denied the Catholics in the British scheme to starve out the Papists. If you survived the coffin ships crossing the Atlantic and the sick houses at the port lands.” Here he swept his arm wide, taking in the horizon. “And of course this godforsaken climate.”

Emma glanced at Jim, like she was waiting for the punchline to a bad joke. He had nothing to offer so he put a hand on her shoulder. Travis was slackjawed, eating it up.

Corrigan welcomed the stares coming his way and glared back with delight. “And come we did. The Corrigans and the Connellys. The Keefes and the Farrells. Hitchens, Hawkshaws. The Carrolls, O’Connors, the Donnellys and the Berryhills. Land enough for all. But we didn’t leave the old world behind, did we? No, we brought with us the best of the old country and we ferried the worst of it too. The old hatreds and the feuding. Our cherished bigotries and enmities, one for the other.”