Bold Sons of Erin Read online

  BOLD SONS

  OF ERIN

  Owen Parry

  [Ralph Peters]

  STACKPOLE

  BOOKS

  Books by Ralph Peters

  Nonfiction

  Lines of Fire

  Endless War

  Looking for Trouble

  Wars of Blood and Faith

  New Glory

  Never Quit the Fight

  Beyond Baghdad

  Beyond Terror

  Fighting for the Future

  Fiction

  Cain at Gettysburg

  The Officer’s Club

  The War After Armageddon

  Traitor

  The Devil’s Garden

  Twilight of Heroes

  The Perfect Soldier

  Flames of Heaven

  The War in 2020

  Red Army

  Bravo Romeo

  Writing as Owen Parry

  Faded Coat of Blue

  Shadows of Glory

  Call Each River Jordan

  Honor’s Kingdom

  Rebels of Babylon

  Our Simple Gifts

  Strike the Harp

  Copyright © 2003 by Owen Parry

  Published by

  STACKPOLE BOOKS

  5067 Ritter Road

  Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

  www.stackpolebooks.com

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055.

  Printed in the United States

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, reproduction number LC-DIG-cwpb-00250

  Cover design by Tessa Sweigert

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parry, Owen.

  Bold sons of Erin / Owen Parry.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8117-1133-3 (pbk.) — ISBN 0-8117-1133-1 (pbk.)

  1. Jones, Abel (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Irish Americans—Fiction. 3. Welsh Americans—Fiction. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A7637B65 2012

  813'.54—dc23

  2012003810

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8117-4855-1

  To the people of Schuylkill County

  . . . a lie which is all a lie may be

  met and fought with outright,

  But a lie which is part a truth is a

  harder matter to fight.

  —Tennyson

  ONE

  THE MOON WORE A BANDIT’S MASK OF CLOUD TO ROB the sky of stars. Cold it was in the boneyard, for October had shown her teeth. When the wind scraped down the hillside, dead leaves rose, riding a sudden gust to climb my back. They crackled and scratched and crumpled. My lantern glowed, faint as the hopes of Judas. Even that much light was a mortal risk.

  That night was murder black and stank of death. I wished me far away, that I will tell you. But I needed the body.

  If body there was in the coffin.

  The boys dug glumly, dutiful but slow. For no one likes to retrieve a new-laid corpse. The soldiers I had brought along were Dutchmen, thick and quiet, as solemn as death themselves. Still, I hushed them every time they coughed. Vital it was that the Irish should not learn of us. For the sons and daughters of Erin adore their dead, and graves enchant them. They will kill for a corpse as soon as for the living.

  Now, a Dutchman has his own odd superstitions, carried from the darkness of the Germanies. But the soldiers at their labor had other fears, far more real than demons or even the Irish. They believed what they had heard, that contagion lay in that grave. As for my Christian self, I kept me quiet.

  I did not believe it was cholera, see.

  The wind slashed through our uniforms, like bayonets through Pandy. When I held the lantern high, it swayed and sputtered. If I lowered it down, the leaves attacked the glass, swarming like wild Afghanees at the kill. We were at work in the hills of home, in Pennsylvania, where miners dismayed by the war had turned to violence. But India was with me, too, its ghosts the sort that linger in the mind to whisper of life’s swiftness and fragility. I believed the Irish had lied about the cholera and thought the coffin likely to be empty. Yet, death’s transforming power touches all. Rare is the fool who smiles in a graveyard.

  And I knew death.

  I do not speak of Our Savior’s death, not when I speak of that night, but of lesser fates that I myself had witnessed. First as a child in Wales, then as a soldier, when the heat of love come to scald me in Lahore. But let that bide. For now I was a married man and a major got up proper, and I had begun a new life in America.

  I did not believe it was cholera. I declined to think it.

  The soldiers grumbled over their shovels, glancing at me like children put to punishment. I did not mean to be hard with them, for they were of the invalid corps, and each had suffered in body, if not in soul. But healthy enough they were to serve the provost, to shepherd draft lists or guard a shipment of coal. And the four could dig the earth of the grave between them.

  I did not believe it was cholera. My fears were of the Irish down below, in the patch houses, where the mine families spilled from crowded beds, all coughing and complaint. I feared their pastor, as well, at rest in the shanty above us, by his church. For well I knew the duplicity of priests, and the fierceness of their loyalties, which were not always simply to their faith. I had been told that this one lived with books, that he was clean and well spoken, with high manners. It did not tally up. Why would a gentleman deign to labor among those souls cast out of Donegal, from Mayo and Roscommon, or from Clare? I meant to make his acquaintance in good time, to see how much of the darkness of Rome was upon him and to test his tales of cholera out of season. For he had put his name to the cause of death, with the honor of his office as his bond. If we found no body in the grave, the priest would have to answer.

  All that was to come. First, we had to dig.

  I had been warned of violence, of the laborers’ rage at Mr. Lincoln’s draft and their taste for murder. But I had served beside such men in India. The Irish, I mean. Those famine lads cut loose to find their keep, in a world that did not want them or their kind. Lately I had seen them at their finest, climbing the slopes above a Maryland creek, marching into a torrent of death, falling only to close ranks again, and fighting as grandly as any men could do. I knew the Irish could fight, see. But I did not want their fight to be with me. I had come to admire certain of their qualities, their boldness in battle, and their reverence for song—although I could not praise them as a race. Nor do they count as true and proper Christians. Still, I thought I knew them well enough to keep me safe and sound while at my work.

  How little I knew, in my vanity and pride.

  I had forbidden my Dutchmen to speak a word, warning them not to clang their shovel heads. Such noises carry like whistles on the wind. And gales play tricks. Had the night been still we would have heard the steam engines down by the colliery, ceaselessly pumping water from the mines. Men slept, but the pumps could not. I knew their throb, that giant iron heartbeat, from Mr. Evans’s pits just north of Pottsville, where I had kept the books before the war, and from the countless shafts that pocked our county. It is a constant struggle, see. The earth tries to drown the men who steal her coal.

  We should have heard the drumming of those machines. But the wind come down from the ridge to carry the sound off. That same blow would carry our noises down to the com
pany patch, where the Irish miners slept in their exhaustion. Even nature seemed hostile on that hillside. I had cautioned my lads to be quiet, again and again.

  Then one sound, abrupt as death, shut my fingers choke-tight over my cane. It almost made me reach beneath my cloak, just to feel the certainty of my Colt.

  Twas the sound of a shovel meeting the wood of a coffin.

  I did not think it was cholera. And yet I stepped me back. For I have reason to fear that cruel disease: The memory of my mother dead on the planking, with the locked door trapping me in with her staring eyes. And the loss in Lahore, much later, that haunts me still.

  Cholera is too ready a companion. It follows a man over continents and oceans. Even in the fairest summer cantonment, it killed more soldiers than bullets ever did. The rivers of India swelled with bloated niggers, their shorelines ripe with corpses torn by dogs. It made no least distinction between ranks, and showed a hunger for both fair and foul. At night, the burning pyres stank of Hell. The comrade who shared your morning porridge shat himself to death and died in vomit before the bugler sounded you to your tent. Cholera is the bane of modern times.

  The soldiers drew back from the rim of the grave, leaving only the fellow taking his turn in the hole. A sergeant he was, but one not shy of work. He looked up at me, face broad and Dutch in the lantern’s cast. His whiskers were blond, but the light turned them bloody red.

  “Sollen wir doch weiter, Herr Major?” Sergeant Dietrich asked me. “Now we must open the box, ja?”

  “Go on,” I told him in a lowered voice. Just loud enough to be heard above the wind. “Clean off the box, and we will look inside.”

  He shook his head. Not to refuse my order, but in fear. “And if it is the cholera, Herr Major? Ich will nit krank werden. Bitte, nun. Hab’ Kinder, eine junge Frau . . .”

  “It is not the cholera. That I can tell you.” I almost added something more, but had the sense to check my own emotions. “Clean off the coffin and open it.”

  He wished to obey me, for that is the German’s nature. Your Dutchman is tame as the Irishman is wild. But fear of infection had frozen the fellow’s limbs. He was a great ox of a farmer, as big as I am small. Although I do show well in the chest and shoulders. But the size of the heart is a greater matter than the length of a fellow’s bones.

  The others looked to the sergeant, not to me. For they were farmers from the south of the county, where the seams of coal gave way to stubbled fields and painted barns replaced the black ened collieries. The men were long acquainted, then melded close by war.

  To give a command is a wonderful thing, but obedience will be earned. The soldiers did not know me, you understand. I was merely another bothersome officer, with a limp and a nasty scar upon his cheek, but otherwise no different from the others. When you serve in the ranks, all officers seem a menace. You only hope they will leave you in peace and not see you killed to curry a colonel’s favor.

  Those men owed me the loyalty laid down in regulations. But words on paper never conquered fear. Had an Irish mob rushed up from the patch, the Dutchmen would have fled to save their lives. Brave though they had been on distant battlefields.

  “Get out of the grave,” I told the sergeant quietly. “Raus. Verstehe?”

  “Jawohl, Herr Major!” He scrambled up the sifting earth to stand beside his comrades.

  I handed the sergeant the lantern, nearly losing our light to a blast of wind.

  “Echtes Hexenwetter,” one of the privates muttered.

  Weather for witches. That is what he said. I knew it, for I had applied myself to the mighty German tongue and had some Dutch by now. We must ever seek to improve our lives, with study as well as devotion.

  I almost dressed them down for their superstition, which I refuse to allow into my life. And I would have singed their ears, that I can tell you. For I was not so calm as I pretended to be. When our nerves are short we speak to blister gunmetal. But I let it go.

  I do not believe in witches or such like. A modern man lends no ear to such nonsense. And darkness has no power over Christians. But we were in agreement on the weather, which pierced. A soldier who has served on the Northwest Frontier knows well the weather’s power over the heart.

  I laid down my cane and climbed into the grave, landing on the coffin’s lid with a thump. My bad leg cropped a bother, but no matter. I took up the shovel and began to scrape the remaining dirt from the wood.

  I did not think it was cholera. But I was not prepared for the foulness that awaited me.

  THE MOON HID DEEP BEHIND THE CLOUDS, until its light was naught but a stingy glow. The lantern sputtered, held too high by the sergeant. It lit his face, dulled by animal fear, but hardly helped me see what I was doing. Twas not enough to clean off the coffin’s lid, for I needed room to perch as I opened the box. Navvy’s work it was and not fit for a major. Not when other ranks were standing about. But we must not be proud or succumb to vanity. I put off my cloak and went to it.

  Despite the cold, I worked me into a sweat. Even though the soil was still loose from the burying, the task wanted all my back and shoulders could give. An awkward business it was. Since I am not tall, I had a devilish time lifting the dirt free of the hole. The wind was a wicked tease, as well, spraying the boneyard earth back into my face.

  The soldiers above me mumbled, staring down at my doings in mounting fear.

  Leaves rushed into the grave like rats, pestering me at my labor.

  “Give me the bar,” I said at last, handing up the shovel.

  A fellow with a limp to rival mine own did as I asked. The metal streaked my hand with cold when I gripped it. And then I went to work again, trying not to make an infernal noise. The wood was cheap and it splintered.

  I smelled the body at the first cracking. A great stink it made. Then the others smelled it and edged back.

  “Hold out the lantern!” I ordered, not without temper. Smelling was not enough, I had to see.

  Startled I was, though. For I had thought to find the coffin empty and all of it a ruse. Far too neat things were, with the Irish fellow who bragged of a general’s murder dying all sudden of cholera, then plugged in the ground before the county coroner could make his way up from Pottsville to poke at the corpse. The swift interment was meant to prevent infection, according to the priest. Of course, I believed the Irish were shielding the murderer with a mock burial. While the killer ran from the law.

  That was why I was doing my digging by night, one of the first acts in my investigation of the murder of General Stone, a poor fellow whose only sin had been an effort to recruit the sons of Erin for our army. Mr. Lincoln himself wished to find out the guilty, although we had generals dying by the hundredweight on battlefields from Maryland to Mississippi. Of course, a murder is a different matter.

  Now I smelled death. And that is a smell I know. Yet, there was something queer about it, as if I sensed more than I could properly tell.

  “I can’t see, man,” I snapped, in a sweaty grump. “Hold the lantern lower.”

  I smelled their fear as clearly as I smelled that rotting corpse. But the sergeant bent over the grave. For sergeants must bear the dangers others flee.

  “Herrgott erbarme,” the Dutchman prayed. But the fellow did his duty.

  “Lower!” I commanded. With the fear upon me, too.

  I cracked the lid open broadly and a pulse of stench near sent me scrambling myself. The lantern retreated, then returned again.

  I gagged. I could not help it. And I heard a man retch. Twas then I knew what it was that had struck me odd. The smell was of death, indeed. But death has a great bouquet of smells, and this one was not right. The man said to have been buried would have been dead less than a week. Now, that is time enough to stink profoundly. But the reek I met in that hole was the one you encounter upon your return to last month’s battlefield. The fragrance of death gone stale.

  The lantern quit me again. I heard the big fellow free his stomach of its contents. But I pushe
d on. By feel, I got the lid all off and propped it against stray roots and crumbling dirt.

  I straightened my back, yearning for one good draught of fresh, clean air. I am not tall and could hardly see above the rim of the grave.

  “Hand the lamp to me, Sergeant Dietrich. Here. Give it over, man.”

  My God, the stink come high.

  The sergeant did as bidden, though he did not want to approach the grave, nor to surrender the light. The world had gone dark as the blackest heathen’s soul. And that light had grown precious to him. Still, he followed orders, passing the flickering lamp to my outstretched hand.

  I lowered the lantern into the grave.

  And found not a man but a woman, many weeks dead.

  LOOK YOU. I was prepared for an empty box, or for a buried man. But the unexpected disarms us. The sight of a young woman’s body—for young she was, despite her rictus grin and leathered flesh—well, the sight of such a one as that confused me.

  She had a great shining luxury of cinnamon-colored hair and the good teeth of youth exposed by lips curled back. “O, thou still unravished bride of time . . .” I quoted Mr. Keats, who died young himself. But that was nonsense. For ravaged to a horror the poor thing was, though not by time. The vermin had gone at her, making a feast. The pennies set on her eyes had fallen away, but mercy was abroad, for the lids had locked themselves shut for all eternity. Although a worm squeezed out to have a look at me.

  Glad I was that I did not see her eyes. For eyes accuse. And gladder still I was much later on, when I learned who she was and why she was buried thus. Intimacy enough there was between us.

  Perhaps it was my quiet that drew him. Sergeant Dietrich edged back to the rim of the grave.

  “’Ne Frau ist es, doch? Was soll dass heissen, Herr Major?”

  “Speak English!” I told him impatiently, for my manners had gone frayed. “Yes, it’s a woman. Hardly more than a girl, I think. And I don’t know what it means.”

  “Ich dachte mir es war ja ein Mann? I think we are looking for a man’s body, nicht wahr?”