Two in the Field (14 page)

He described the ‘tumbling out’, when the sheriff and property agent showed up with crowbar-toting peasants and extra police at the ready. The neighborhood women keened and tore their hair and clutched at the sheriff’s knees, begging.

My imagination filled in images as he told of peasants swarming over the house and breaking the roof beam, everything crashing down in clouds of dust. Andy’s face was stony, his voice bitter. “We were put out on the road with our main bed, a kettle, a tub, a chest, one or two stools—that was it.” A kindly neighbor
had allowed them to share an outhouse with pigs and geese. They survived by eating the livestock’s feed and making soup from rushes used to weave roofs. This regimen weakened the infant Liam to the point that he died on the family’s ocean trip.

“I send money back there regularly now,” he said. “I wish Cait knew about that.”

I easily empathized with his feelings at being cut off from a part of his family. His pain mirrored mine. “I’ll tell her about it when I find her,” I promised. “You have no clue at all where she is?”

He shook his head. “All I know is, three or four years ago she went with General O’Neill to recruit Irish boys out of the hard-coal mines in Pennsylvania.”

“Recruit them for what?” I asked. “Invade Canada again?”

“No, at least not directly. I think it had to do with settlements in the west.”

When he said “west” I felt the pull again. It had to be the direction to Cait.

“I guess I’ll be heading for coal country,” I told him.

A troubled frown creased his forehead. “In that case, there’s something else you need to know. I heard a great deal on the subject in Cavan, where the societies originated.”

“What societies?”

The train began to slow as we approached a station.

“Secret ones,” he said. “They came over here with the coal miners. In the old country they were called Whiteboys or Threshers.” He explained that they operated by terror, flaying the skin off enemies with wire carding brushes or houghing them—cutting the tendon above the heel—to leave them as living examples.

Great, I thought.

“They’re doing this where Cait went?”

He nodded somberly. “They’ve likely moved up to guns and
dynamite,” he said, “but I’ve heard they still give warning notes with black spots.”

A suspicion dawned. “What name do they go by?”

“Well, the one most used goes back to a time in Ireland when some of them hid themselves as women.”

“And that is?”

“Molly Maguires.”

 NINE 

The trip from Boston to the heart of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region covers three hundred miles, but spring storms had knocked out bridges, and it took me nearly five days to get there on a bewildering succession of railroad lines.

The sodden weather matched the gloomy landscape: hills sawtoothed with man-made gorges; outcroppings and ridges standing black against the sky. At each successive stop the towns grew smaller and shabbier, the people poorer and more sickly. Their shacks emitted thin trails of smoke that mixed with the rainclouds and vapors in the valleys. The coal settlements were called “patches.” The majority were Irish, with pockets of Scottish and Welsh. The Irish looked the poorest.

Besides what Andy had told me, most of what I knew about the Molly Maguires came from an old Sean Connery movie I’d seen in the 1970s. Led by Connery, the Mollies resisted the mine operators and the police. They were infiltrated by a Pinkerton (Richard Harris) who befriended them, sparked a romance with a beautiful Irish girl (Samantha Eggar) and even helped plan some of their actions. His court testimony got Connery and other leading Mollies hanged. Sweet guy. The only downside for him, as I recalled, had been a mild case of angst over not winding up with Eggar.

In late afternoon I reached Pottsville, a tranquil pine-shaded town with a river coiling through its center. The spired churches and frame houses looked far too prosperous to harbor desperate strikers. The accents I heard at the train station were not Irish but German. I asked the ticketmaster how to find the striking miners.

“Nearest patch would be Minersville,” he said. “You can take the cars to Schuylkill Haven and connect there or hire a mule wagon to take you over Sharp Mountain.”

Given the weather, his second choice didn’t sound good. Resigning myself to yet more train time, I bought a ticket on the Carbon & Schuylkill, a branch of the Reading. I learned from the ticketmaster that it was owned by a bigwig named Gowen, who also controlled the anthracite fields. I seemed to recall that name from the movie.

Outside Pottsville the rain stopped, but the sky remained laced with dark clouds. Ridges of black slag edged the swollen Schuylkill River. Minersville turned out to be basically one long mud-filled street between the heaps of slag and cinders. The foreboding look of the bunkers and winding towers and conveyers of the vacant collieries was heightened by a guard patrolling with a shotgun.

McHay’s Tavern, a block from the station, offered a sullen welcome. I stepped over a pungent pool of mule piss in front and into a dark, ill-smelling room occupied by out-of-work miners. Early drinkers. I felt their stares as I set my valise down at the end of the “bar,” in this case two long planks resting on barrels. “Who are ye?” said the barkeep, a giant with arms like a pair of bellows.

Not the warmest of welcomes.

Since Fenians could be lurking anywhere, I’d given the matter of my identity some thought. “Hemingway,” I said, and ordered a whiskey to fight the chill. “Journalist.”

“Another one of those, is it?” He set a smudged glass before me.

“You’ve had others?”

He thrust a recent
Leslie’s Illustrated
at me. It featured the striking miners with a picture titled “The Last Loaf” showing a ragged
woman unable to feed her starving children. “Which paper ye from?” he demanded.

The
Chronicle
didn’t seem viable here.
“Atlantic Monthly,”
I told him. “We’re thinking of doing a feature.”

“Oh, are ye now,” he said. “Maybe for once ye’ll get it right. How about instead of ‘economic conditions’ ”—he jabbed a thick finger at the
Leslie’s
text—“putting the blame where it belongs—on Gowen and the other fine-haired fookers in charge of the mines?”

I nodded judiciously, as if it sounded reasonable. “I’m on another assignment first,” I told him. “Namely, to catch up on General O’Neill’s current projects.”

He stared at me.

“John O’Neill,” I prompted. “The Fenian leader.”

“To be sure,” he said.

A man slouching at the bar sang in drunken slurs:

“Shut your sotted mouth!” the bartender roared, quieting the drunk and stifling laughter. “O’Neill took up arms for Irishmen! I’ll not have him lowered!”

The room was silent.

“I’m not looking to lower him,” I said. “I’m aware that many people regard the General as a hero.”

“Damn square he is!”

“That’s why our readers will be interested in what he’s doing now. My information is that he came here to recruit Irishmen.”

He thrust his face close to mine, his breath foul. “Is it not the breaker ye really want to ask about?”

I leaned away. “What’s that?”

“Ye’re ignorant of it?” His eyes bored into mine and I realized that he was conducting a primitive lie detector test, watching my pupils for dilation. “Are ye?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“A breaker crushes coal.” As if talking to a lout, eyes fixed on mine, he described a high, sloping-roofed building where a steam elevator lifted lumps of anthracite weighing up to three hundred pounds each to the top and then dumped them into a big hopper or funnel that led to the crushing machinery, teeth-like grinders. The chunks fell to screens where they were sorted and then loaded on railway cars. “But ye see, except for the metal parts, the breaker’s made of wood.”

I couldn’t decide which I liked less—his stare or his breath. “So what?”

“Wood burns. Two nights ago a colliery breaker in Locust Gap burned to the ground. So the peelers are everywhere now, looking for those who lit the blaze, and it’s said that Pinkerton’s men are coming.” His eyes narrowed. “Others are here, too. Last week it took three hundred of our boyos to stop blackleg scabs from reopening a mine over in Shenandoah. Now the operators have threatened to flood the shafts so nobody can work ’em. It’s a desperate time for ye to be showin’ up, Mr. Hemingway.”

All the while, he continued to stare into my eyes.

“All I want are some leads on General O’Neill.” I said, “Then I’ll be on my way.”

“In gratitude for this, could ye write a few bits of truth?”

“What sort of truth?”

He brought his fist down on the
Leslie’s
with an abrupt, nerve-jangling crash. “Such as reporting not just the mere
suffering
here”—he spat out the word with impressive vitriol—“but its true causes!”

It was dawning on me that I’d get no help otherwise. “Such as?” I said mildly.

“Such as Gowen and the operators starving our women and wee ones! Such as their urging Welsh thugs to smash our heads! Such as not keeping a single promise! Such as doing all in their power to break the Miners’ and Laborers’ Benefit Association!” He took a breath, his face red. “You spalpeen writers make it out like the strikers brought on their own suffering!”

I understood what he was saying. Tales of suffering boost newspaper and magazine sales. The media were profiting from his people’s misery.

“Nobody’s willing to write what you just said?” I asked.

“Not so far,” he said pointedly. “There’s no profit to be had in taking on Mr. Gowen and his ilk—besides telling the plain truth, that is.”

He stared at me. The suggestion of quid quo pro was evident.

“I suppose I could work up something on all that,” I told him.

“Sure and ye
could,”
he said sarcastically.

“And if I do?”

His manner changed with almost comic rapidity as he leaned forward and said in chummy tones, “In true fact, General O’Neill was here several times to recruit for his Irish community out west.”

Finally
. My heart thumped in my chest. “Where out west?”

He looked at me shrewdly. “Now,
that
I surely don’t know—nor does any soul here.” He stared around as if to challenge the room. “But we can have a man brought from St. Clair to answer your every question. Is that agreeable?”

Unspoken was,
If you tell our version of the story
.

“When?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “You write up your story and let us see it. Then you’ll get what you want.”

“Fine.” The assignment actually appealed to my reporter’s instincts. The miners doubtless were getting a raw deal. It would be nice to tell their side of the story. But the job would take a hell of a lot of research. I had no outlet. I didn’t trust the barkeeper for an instant. And I couldn’t see how making powerful enemies would help me in my quest to find Cait.

“After you read your grand words to us,” he said with a wolfish grin, “we’ll all march over to the cable office and watch you send it off to your fine
Atlantic Monthly.”

Uh oh. I could feel the web tightening. “Where can I stay tonight?” He named a railway inn I’d seen near the station. A filthy, decrepit-looking place. “Sounds good,” I said, without any intention of staying there. What I wanted was to get out of Minersville as fast as I could. But it was late and trying to leave just then might be more problematic than staying.

From outside came shouts and a clatter on the boardwalk. “Thomas is shot!” somebody shouted. “Bully Bill’s dead!” Several men in the room cheered while others looked stunned. The bartender gave me a warning look that said to get out for my own good. Or maybe, I thought later, to keep me from hearing something that incriminated them.

“I’ll find that lodging now,” I told him.

A mist was falling and darkness had settled. Walking away from the station, I saw a sign on a house in a side street:
Traveler’s Rest
. The house was in disrepair, with shutters hanging aslant and shingles missing, but something about it appealed to me—maybe the periwinkles blooming in little pots on the porch.