The Devil's Due: An Irish Historical Thriller Page 4

  I needn’t have worried. The men on Ellis Island had been more concerned with the diseases we Irish might be carrying than with our papers. And since I had money left after the voyage, they weren’t concerned that I would become a ward of the state. But while the passing was grand, once I left Ellis Island, I joined the ranks of thousands of other immigrants who had come ashore with me: each in search of a job and a place to stay.

  ___

  Lost in the bustling streets of Manhattan, I couldn’t help but think of my father’s farm. Only nineteen acres, it was a peaceful place in the country where several days might pass before we saw a neighbor. Limerick City, just ten miles away, was filled with tall buildings, its streets crowded with people and carts and motorcars all fighting for space. Even after I joined the cause and spent more and more time in Limerick on IRA business, I always felt out of place, a stranger in a foreign land. And although I had seen other cities—Cork, Cobh, Dublin—nothing had prepared me for what I found in New York.

  America: the land of milk and honey, where everyone was a millionaire! I soon found out that most of what I had heard about America—what we Irish called The Golden Door—wasn’t true. Sure, we were escaping the disease, the poverty and British oppression, but the dirty tenements, the gangs, and the corruption in New York were things we had never heard about when we dreamed of better lives. We had left the British behind, but even America had its share of disease and poverty. Still, with all that, America offered the Irish something that had been denied us for centuries: opportunity.

  It’s difficult to describe New York, a place so big yet so small at the same time. When I first arrived, shortly after the New Year in 1921, some five and a half million people—almost twice as many as in all of Ireland—had arrived before me. And with each passing day, thousands more came. The English, the Poles, the Jews, and the Germans had all come before the Irish, and it had taken us several generations to earn our place. But earn it we did. Not bothered by pride, we took whatever jobs we could, for the certainty of weekly pay was something we had never known, toiling each day on our farms, unsure if this was the year when the crop would fail again. We worked with our hands and our backs, unloading cargo from ships, laying track for railroads, and riveting steel, miles from the safety of the ground. Irish women made trousers and dresses and shirts by the thousands, their feet nonstop on the treadles while their hands fed yard after yard of cloth through the sewing machines of the garment factories. Still others could be found as servants in countless hotels and houses, cleaning and minding the children of the rich. Laborers we were, and we swelled the ranks of the trade unions, bringing an activism all our own. By the time I arrived, names like Murphy, O’Connell, and Daugherty were already common in government buildings and in the police stations and firehouses throughout the city.

  ___

  I made my home in a single room in a crowded tenement with nothing but clotheslines and laundry to see out the only window. The building was just south of the Gas House district, a dangerous area of slums and gangs on the Lower East Side, where the air was filled with the foul smells from the tanks and from too many people in too small a space. Cautiously, I made contacts in the Irish community to learn what I needed to know to survive in this new land.

  Being a pig farmer, I was able to find a job as a butcher’s apprentice in one of the slaughter houses in the Meatpacking District. It wasn’t close to where I lived, but I didn’t mind the walk. The pay was poor, barely enough to cover the rent, but with what I was able to steal—mostly food from the slaughterhouse and the farmer’s market nearby—I survived.

  At nights I would lie awake, listening to the sounds of life in the tenement—the laughter, the shouts, the arguments, the fights. And with so many people came a stench, the foul smells of the street drifting through my open window. Even that didn’t stop my thoughts from drifting to Kathleen. It had been almost a year since I had last seen her, huddled below her linens, her fingers fidgeting with the medal she wore as she stared at the floor.

  ___

  There was good reason few knew that I was courting Kathleen: she and I were cousins. A marriage between close family bloodlines, although common in other countries, was a sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church. A rich man might receive dispensation in exchange for a generous contribution, but such options were not available to someone like me. Sin wasn’t something I spent much time worrying over; my fate was known. But it worried Kathleen.

  I had known Kathleen since we were children. One year older than me, she was the daughter of my mother’s brother. For years, we only saw each other on special events: at weddings or funerals and occasionally on fair days. But like many our age we stuck to our own kind, Kathleen preferring the company of the women and the girls while I got into one form of mischief or another with the boys. That changed in my fourteenth year, when I met Kathleen on a fair day at the end of September.

  On a bright, clear day, my father and I left at dawn with two cows, headed to Rathkeale, some eight miles away. We arrived at noon and, while he bartered their sale, I wandered the streets looking for fun. I passed the pens by the railway station, half full of cattle waiting to be shipped. The crowds from the pubs spilled out into the street. The laughter of men, taking a break from their toils with a pint, filled the air. The horse races were about to start, and as I made my way over, I passed the blacksmith shop. The blacksmith, a man Kathleen called Uncle John, was standing outside, glancing at his watch. Fair days were big events for a blacksmith and rare it was for him to leave his shop. But then again, John was not one to miss the races.

  “Ah, Frank,” he said when he saw me. “Kathleen will be along in a moment. You won’t mind waiting?” Before I could say anything, he patted my shoulder. “Now there’s a good lad.” He smiled. “I’ll see you at the races.” And then he was gone.

  Frustrated at having to wait, I stood in front of his shop, watching the stream of people making their way to the fields at the edge of town. I heard the bang of a hammer on anvil, John’s apprentice busy inside. I shook my head. I had never missed a race before and had no intentions to miss this one, cousin or no cousin.

  “Hi, Frank.”

  The words startled me, sounding strangely seductive, more like music than a voice. To hear my own name like that was something I had never experienced before. Excited and nervous at the same time, I turned, feeling the flame in my cheeks as I did.

  “Kathleen?” I said, “Is it yourself?” The Kathleen I remembered was a wee lass, one who had never paid me any mind before. But now, in front of me stood a grown woman and a beautiful one at that. And she was talking to me and smiling, something the Kathleen I knew had never done before, or if she had, it was something she hadn’t done for me.

  Kathleen laughed at my obvious surprise. Years later, I would realize that she was pleased with herself and pleased too with my obvious discomfort. The prospect of talking to a girl was something that frightened me, but after an awkward start I found talking to Kathleen was easy. The streets slowly emptied, but neither of us seemed to notice.

  We talked for a long time—I had no way of knowing how long—and Kathleen told me of the things that had happened since the last time we had seen each other. She was still in school—rare enough for any girl or boy our age—and she was still living with her sister, Mary.

  There was a noise from the crowd, and then excited shouts and I looked over my shoulder knowing the races were about to begin.

  “Please don’t go, Frank,” she said. I felt her hand on my arm, a strange feeling coursing up to my shoulder, filling my chest.

  I turned back. Kathleen wasn’t smiling anymore and I saw something different in her eyes: an uncertainty, a vulnerability I hadn’t noticed earlier.

  “Not yet,” she continued, her voice suddenly soft and quiet and strangely uncertain.

  I felt a lump in my throat. Then her hand slid down my arm and grasped my own. She stepped closer, and I could feel the heat of her body.

&n
bsp; “And not until you kiss me first.”

  ___

  We Irish honor our traditions, and slow we are to change. Like the rituals surrounding death, courtship and marriage had their own rituals and rare it was that they weren’t followed. Matchmakers, chaperones, the walkings and dowries were things long ingrained in our culture. Alas, such customs were not possible for Kathleen and me. There was no father to ask for Kathleen’s hand as her own—my uncle—had died years ago. There were no brothers or uncles—Uncle John, the blacksmith, was really her brother-in-law and he had died several years ago too. The only family Kathleen knew—the only one that mattered—was her sister Mary. And while I had a mother, I wasn’t certain if she even knew if I was still alive. And if she did, I wasn’t certain if she cared.

  There were practical reasons why we couldn’t marry, or so I told myself at the time. I wondered now if I had made the right decision. Kathleen was a domestic servant, and it was rare for a married woman to work outside the home—a custom that favored men in more ways than one. While Kathleen wasn’t opposed to this, I was. The Irish Republican Army had called us Volunteers for volunteers we were. When I first joined, I had been able to work during the day and train and fight with the Volunteers at night. But for the few months before I had been forced to flee, the British had kept us on the run. We were called a Flying Column, going wherever the IRA sent us to wage our war, finding shelter in someone’s barn at night or sleeping in the fields if we had to. As the war wore on, we spent more time away from our homes and away from our occupations. Without some way to put bread on the table in the evenings, I had been reluctant to have Kathleen leave her job. I could make do with the kindness of those who supported our cause, but would it be enough to support a wife too? The war had turned uglier with each passing day and with me on the run, getting married hadn’t made any sense.

  It was one of the many regrets I carried with me through the streets of New York.

  ___

  I had posted a letter a week after I had arrived, a long note filled with stories about the wonder and excitement of New York—the type of letter an Irishman far from home was expected to write. I signed it Michael O’Sullivan, a name I hoped Kathleen would recognize. The IRA had men in the post office who read the mail, always on the lookout for spies and informants. And always on the lookout for traitors like me.

  I didn’t know how long it would take my letter to reach Kathleen—four to five weeks I suspected. Maybe more. Still, I continued to send letters each week, anxiously hoping that each new day would bring her response.

  It was eight long weeks before her first letter arrived. It was a Saturday evening, and I had just returned from the day’s work anxious to clean the blood and grime from the slaughterhouse off my hands and face. I got the fire going in the stove and set the water on top, waiting for it to heat up for my bath. I sat in front of the stove and shivered, the fire not yet hot enough to drive the cold and damp from the room. There was a slam in the hall and, a moment later, a sharp knocking on my door. I flinched.

  “Mr. O’Sullivan?”

  I recognized the voice and let out a breath. My fear of both the IRA and the British had followed me all the way to New York. I opened the door to a short, thin woman, an apron poking out below the heavy black sweater she kept wrapped around herself to ward off the chill.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Hirsch.” I did my best to smile. I had never seen her smile back, and tonight was no different.

  I had met Mrs. Hirsch shortly after I moved into the apartment. I shivered involuntarily, but it wasn’t from the cold. Mrs. Hirsch’s cheeks were sunken and her eyes seemed almost too large for her face. Like many, she carried pains from the past, and her eyes betrayed the sorrow that had followed her. She reminded me of my mother.

  “I found this in my box,” Mrs. Hirsch said, pulling an envelope from inside her sweater. I felt my heart skip a beat.

  “A letter from home, it would seem,” she said as she handed it to me.

  I resisted the urge to grab it and tear it open.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hirsch.” I smiled again then stared down at the letter in my hand. I ran my hand across the return address, touching Kathleen’s name, feeling her writing. I coughed and turned my head, not wanting Mrs. Hirsch to see the tear in my eye.

  “The soup will be ready in thirty minutes,” she said, apparently oblivious to my reaction or more likely choosing to ignore it. She continued standing in my doorway and it took me a second or two to remember why.

  “A moment, Mrs. Hirsch,” I said as I retrieved the package from the table.

  Wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, the package would last her for several days.

  She nodded once—silently—as she took the beef shank. She pulled the sweater around her once more and turned away.

  We had an arrangement, Mrs. Hirsch and I. I brought her meat—stolen from the slaughter house—several times a week. In exchange she made me supper and washed my clothes and linens.

  I closed the door and, forgetting about the chill and the bath water warming on the stove, carefully opened Kathleen’s letter. I unfolded the single page and held it to my nose, hoping to find something—the sweet scent of Kathleen, the earthy, damp smell of Ireland. Maybe it was the day’s soil still on my hands and in my clothes, but I found nothing, at least nothing that I had been hoping for. I stared at the pages. The curls and loops of Kathleen’s writing flowed across the paper, and I ran my fingers across the words. On the bottom, I saw where Kathleen had signed her name and sighed when I touched it. I pulled a chair over, sat by the fire and began reading.

  From the very first line I could see that Kathleen had been cautious, careful with her words so as not to put either of us in jeopardy.

  Dear Cousin,

  I received your letter of 24 February and it gave me great pleasure to hear from you and learn that you are well. I thank God that you arrived safely and am pleased to hear that you have been getting on. America sounds like a dream, but sadly it’s one that I will have to content myself to experience only through your letters.

  There has been much rain here but Mary and I have managed to survive. I left the Cavanagh’s and Mary and I are getting on, mending and doing laundry and with the little we manage to get from our farm, it’s enough.

  I now understand why you had to leave. The troubles that you left behind continue and life in America is surely better for you than it would be here. There is no peace here and no hope in sight. But I am safe so please don’t worry about me. Most of the troubles are in Limerick and Cork and Dublin and in the North. In Kilcully Cross, Mary’s home, there is nothing worth fighting for anyway.

  I’ve not heard from your friends since you left but I am sure they are fine. I wouldn’t trouble yourself writing to them directly as you know how they are. One day here, the next somewhere else. I will inquire for you and let you know in my next letter.

  I long to see you but I know it is not meant to be. I’ll have to content myself with your letters. Please write again.

  Mind yourself,

  Your cousin, Kathleen.

  I turned the page over, looking for more. That’s all? I stared at the words, each one carefully written below the light of the oil lamp in her sister’s cottage. They brought neither hope nor comfort. I told myself that she was only being careful, saying no more than she needed to let me know that she had received my letter and that she was well. I told myself that it was an intelligent thing to do. Still, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I read the last few lines again and sighed as the finality struck me. Her words were filled with a resignation, the same one that always found me in the darkness of my room when sleep wouldn’t come. Events beyond our control had cast us apart and there was nothing we could do to change that.

  ___

  Despite my loneliness, New York was an adventure, as confusing as it was exciting and as frightening as it was grand. Each day brought something new. I soon learned which grocer to trust and which would s
ell you the vegetables too rotten for their own table. I learned how to avoid the gangs of young boys who would gladly stab you with their rusty knives for the few pennies you had in your pocket. And I learned that the past had a way of finding me, even thousands of miles and an ocean away, in the dirty streets of New York.

  It was only one week earlier, on a Friday evening, and I had stopped in the public house, to have a pint with the lads after a long day’s work. Butchers all, we frequented a place owned by a man named Burns, popular with the Irish who worked in the slaughterhouses and produce markets nearby. It was always a quick pint at the end of the week before we each went our own ways.

  I had given up the wire-rimmed glasses and dark hair that had been my disguise on the voyage over, but I was careful not to use my real name. As I had done in Cobh, I told people my name was Michael O’Sullivan.

  I planned on only staying for a short while, knowing full well the dangers of staying too long. One pint too many and tongues loosened; stories would be told and the signing would start. Another pint would be poured, and the process would start all over. It was a mistake I had made once, several months after I’d arrived. The next day, not certain what I’d said or to who, I vowed not to make the same mistake again.

  That night, after two pints, I made my farewells. Although it was a cold night, I welcomed the walk home. I made my way across town, from one river to another, from the Hudson to the East Side, but at First Avenue, I turned south. Several blocks before the Williamsburg Bridge was a bakery that I frequented. Although there were other bakeries closer, this one was owned by an old couple from Clare. The woman reminded me of Kathleen’s sister Mary, and I often found myself there, talking of home.

  I had just stepped out of her store, a loaf of stale bread below my arm—I would crumble it later and boil it in milk—when I heard the voice.