Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (47 page)

Casey cuffed the man’s unresisting hands behind his back and then stepped away, flashlight still trained on his eyes, blinding him as effectively as the absolute darkness would have.

“Get his identification,” Casey said sharply. She stepped forward and took it out of the man’s coat pocket gingerly. She shone the light on the laminated surface of the small card.

“Constable Bernard McKoughpsie,” Casey said out loud, “Now there’s a name I’m committin’ to memory an’ I,” he paused ominously, “have a memory like an elephant. D’ye have a family constable, a wife who’s alone at night an’ wains sleepin’ tight in their beds? Do ye?”

“What’s your name you coward?” The man managed to gurgle out between lips mashed against brick.

“Ye want my name, do ye?” Casey whispered, a soft hiss in the darkness, “I’ll do ye one better Constable, here’s my signature.” There was a sharp cry from the man against the wall, “It’s yers to keep, a little something to remind ye next time ye pick on a helpless man an’ a bit of a girl. An’ before ye sleep at night remember that I, unlike the people ye took such pleasure in beatin’ today, have no compunctions about the sanctity of life, leastwise not the life of scum such as yerself.” He added something guttural in Gaelic and then spit at the man’s feet.

“Come on, Jewel,” Pamela felt the reassurance of his big hand grasping her own, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

They fled into the dark, the street black and silent though further down she thought she caught flashes of fire and the sound of people screaming. They ran for what seemed miles, ran until their legs felt like rubber and the winter night sat at its apex. And everywhere they ran they saw fire, broken glass, people knocked into the pavement, people standing stunned in the street.

“What—what’s happened?” Pamela fought to catch her breath and Casey led her down a back lane, slowing and finally stopping in a patch of darkness, the sounds of devastation and madness distant.

“The police have gone crazy, they’re determined to show the upstart Catholics just who the boss in this city really is, just in case today gave them any ideas.” He was bent over, chest heaving, “What the hell did ye think ye were doin’ back there? Ye nearly got us both killed.”

“I couldn’t leave that poor man alone in the street Casey, they would have beat him badly.”

“Oh, I understand the motivation, Jewel,” he breathed out shakily, “but they’d of done worse to ye if they’d caught ye. What if I hadn’t been there?”

“How’d you know?” she asked, leaning against the wall as the fear took her directly in the knees.

“Had a bad feelin’ about this whole venture but I woke up this morning with knots in my stomach an’ figured I’d best come up and see the situation firsthand an’ then drag the two of ye home. Found Pat at Sylvie’s house an’ she said ye’d stepped out for a breath an’ not come back. Pat and I divided up the streets an’ thank Christ I spotted ye when I did. I was waitin’ for the police to go by before I let ye know I was about but then they started bullyin’ that poor man an’ I knew I’d have to step in if it actually came to blows but then ye leaped into the street an’ all hell broke loose. It was no easy task keepin’ ye in sight after that without be spotted by the bastards myself.”

He stepped towards her touching her wounded cheek gently his hand coming away bloody. “That bastard, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to prevent this from happening.”

She shook her head wordlessly, a painful knot spreading in her chest and he wrapped his arms around her, stroking her hair with a shaking hand.

“Won’t he follow us. Casey?”

“Not anytime soon, I handcuffed him to a pipe. Took all the presence of mind I had not to slit his throat then an’ there. We’d best get out of Derry as soon as possible, though we’ll have to find ye medical attention first.”

“Oh Casey,” she shivered against him, the events of the day beginning to catch up with her. “I was so afraid without you.”

“And I without you,” he whispered back.

A half hour later they crept through the back patch of yard at Sylvie Larkin’s home. Pat opened the door to them his face white and tense.

“Oh thank God,” he breathed when he saw Pamela and then as he took in her battered face, “what happened?”

“A story,” Casey said tersely, “best left for later. Right now we’ve got to get her a doctor.”

“That I believe,” Father Jim ducked under the lintel of the kitchen doorway, “would be my summons. Sit down,” he said to Pamela and then “Sylvie you know the routine, alcohol, needles, suturing thread.

“Are ye a doctor?” Casey asked, eyeing the tall, rawboned man suspiciously.

“Medic,” Father Jim said shortly. “Came over here to visit family and relax if you can believe it,” he peeled the soaked bandage away from Pamela’s face, peering critically at his ruined handiwork. “Alright, Pamela let’s freeze you up and try this again. I ran into Pat as he was searching for you and came here to see if I could help in any way, I suppose it’s fortunate I did.”

“The police have gone mad,” Sylvie said laying Father Jim’s tray down beside him and then moving to fill and boil the kettle, “They were stoning my neighbor right in the street an’ screamin for all us Fenians to come out an’ get what they ought to have given us fifty years ago. Some of them looked as if they’d been drinkin’. An’ Mrs. Tuttle from up the street said they stormed into Wellworth’s an’ just started batoning all the customers an’ smashin’ the glass out of the counters.”

“When the law makers are the law breakers, there is no law,” Pat said quietly, watching with a strained countenance as Father Jim filled a hypodermic syringe with Novocain and began to apply it in measured amounts to the area surrounding the wound. “I’m sorry Casey,” Pat said softly, “I didn’t look out for her the way I should have. This is all my fault.”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Casey said gruffly and sat down, taking Pamela’s hand in his own, murmuring things to her only she and possibly Father Jim could hear.

“How badly will I scar?” Pamela said it low, so Pat would not hear.

Father Jim, who had learned the hard way in Vietnam to differentiate between those who wanted the truth and those who wanted a version they could live with, gave her a hard look and sighed seeing she was of the former school.

“Not so terrible as you’re imagining but it will be noticeable. I’ll make it as thin and straight as I can, but I can’t completely erase the damage.”

“Just do the best you can,” she said and closed her eyes as Father Jim began picking the torn stitches out of her cheek.

That night Derry became a storm of devastation. The police rampaged through poor Catholic neighborhoods, indiscriminately beating men and women, smashing windows and howling abuse at the various inhabitants, swearing to make the roads run red with blood, to rape the women and torture the men. They did what they could to make good on the promise. In the days that followed there would be story upon story of outrage after outrage.

Prime Minister Terence O’Neill responded in the wake of the violence with a long speech which in essence blamed the marchers for all they got and gave a passing slap on the wrist to the men who’d attacked them. In Northern Ireland it was business as usual. A case of the downtrodden finding a neck lower than their own to step upon. The Catholics, the Fenian other had been shown again who ruled, whose blood had been spilled for Ulster and the Union Jack, who owned the government and the streets and the people. And that, as far as the Unionist government was concerned, should have made an end to it.

Of course, it was only the beginning.

The Boston Irish were a race unto themselves.

In the beginning, Boston was the least Irish of cities and had someone in the know been around to advise the hopeful immigrants, they would have told them that Boston was the last place in the Americas for an Irishman to settle. Boston’s roots were sunk deep in the earth of Puritanism. Puritans, regardless of leaving Mother England under the lash of religious persecution were, nevertheless, Englishmen, with the English love for law, order, refinement and liberty. England’s coin of humanitarianism had always been tarnished on the underside, however, by an equal love of subjecting other nations and cultures to their imperialist agenda. Regardless of the colonists’ streak of independence, there still existed a cultural bridge between the Old World and the New that the first Americans took great pride in, a bridge built of a common language and literature, of constitutional rights and taxation based on representational government. A bridge shored up by old stereotypes and prejudices. The English and the Irish had been at war in one sense or another for five hundred years and the colonists seemed only too happy to continue the old war on new soil. The New England colonies were founded on the principle that no man be deprived of life, liberty or property save through due process of law. No man, it seemed, except the Negroes and the Irish.

The first Irish to immigrate to the New World were Protestants, in the main, from Ulster. An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 during the Colonial years. These first immigrants, unlike the mass of Catholics who would follow later, tended to scatter upon the shore, to Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and the less populated areas of New England. As early as 1753 history records police being called into the Boston harbor where an angry mob of people were trying to prevent the Irish immigrants from coming ashore. Boston was already acquiring a reputation for its hard-nosed Congregational biases, for feeling that people of different background and culture were lesser, unclean and most certainly unwelcome. Fleeing their homeland because of high rents, disastrous harvests, food shortages and ballooning prices, the Irish, despite their Protestant faith, faced a hostile and sometimes violent reception from the New England colonists. Nonetheless, as was the usual case, the worst of the animosity would be saved for the Catholics who would come in starving, sickened droves when the Famine drove them from their homeland.

The Catholics, despite virulent persecution and oppression from both the English and the Protestants to the North, were more reluctant to depart from Ireland. Tied to the land by social conditions, they were, by circumstance, more rural, less literate, and bound to clan and parish. The harsh poverty of their lives meant that, often, familiar faces and the land you were born to were the only continuity life offered.

However, there were tragedies even the Irish could not endure. When the Rebellion of 1789 failed, Protestant troops were unleashed to suppress any sign of insurrection in whatever way was deemed fit. Men, women and children were flogged, beaten, hung and murdered for so slight an infraction as wearing the green ribbon of the Revolution. The Act of Union was the final blow however; despairing of ever gaining independence for their country, the Irish began to emigrate to shores where hope might again be resurrected.

It wasn’t until the Famine, though, that the Irish Catholics began to set across the ocean in vast numbers. Two years of failed crops, winters of freezing rain, icy gales, no wood to burn, no crust of bread to eat and the drama of seeing tens of thousands of their countrymen die in the fields and roads, convinced many of the Irish that in Ireland there was no future, only a past that threatened to happen again and again.

But, if the Irish had expected a warm welcome and open arms from the Americans, they were to be sadly disappointed. In Yankee dominated Boston, the reception was even chillier. The Brahmin class of Boston, who held in their white-gloved hands the reins of education, culture and civic duty, had the undiluted Anglo-Saxon abhorrence of Roman Catholicism and an inbred contempt of all things Irish. It was fine for the Irish to starve and die as long as they did it quietly and on their own shores.

Faced with hostile natives and a system they could never hope to penetrate, the Irish tended to congregate together, knowing there was safety in numbers. The waterfront of Boston soon became crowded with congested tenements riddled with unsanitary conditions, several families often sharing a claustrophobically small space, ill-lit, unheated and rife with the specter of disease. Men could only get temporary work and often the women would become the breadwinners, hiring out as domestics to the elite of Boston who didn’t mind the Irish scrubbing their floors so long as they never thought of walking across them.

Editorials of the time castigated the new immigrants as ‘filthy and wretched,’ ‘evil foreign born paupers,’ ‘idle, thriftless, poor, intemperate and barbaric’. They were also accused of making the city of Boston into ‘a moral cesspool’, setting their children out to beg and thieve and of importing ‘their vile propensities and habits from across the water.’

In an alien country, faced with rejection and isolation, with a people who saw their culture as wrong and coarse, the Irish closed ranks and became a world unto themselves. They understood lost causes, insurmountable odds, battles that were lost before the first shot was fired and the failure of every hope they’d ever cherished in their own land. They never, though, understood how to lie down and stop the struggle. If their race was fated, so be it. If God had turned his cheek and abandoned them, well He’d done so before and they’d survived. They would bend, but as a people they would never break. It was this backbone they brought to America and to Boston. Eventually their spirit would out. As would their numbers.

In the five years between 1850 and 1855, the Irish accounted for half of the total increase in Massachusetts population. In a state and a city jacketed and ruled by Puritan ethics even the old Yankee core had to distastefully admit the Irish were becoming a body to reckon with. And a community with the numbers also had the likelihood of evolving into a solid political bloc, whose votes were likely to all swing in the same direction. Slowly the Irish began to see that the United States was not just a refuge to bide time in before the return to the ‘old country’ and that despite harassment, libel and ostracism, their voices, if their cry was loud enough, would be heard in this strange new land.