Free Bold Sons of Erin by Owen Parry, Ralph Peters Page B

Church.”
    “You mean she’s mad?”
    “I shouldn’t think so. Upset, of course. Show me the wife who wouldn’t be. No, my concern is that the poor woman’s run off in her grief and might come to harm. Personally, I rather fear she took the cholera from her husband. She may be lying dead out in the forest.”
    “She is not dead. I saw her.”
    For the first time, his composure failed him utterly. He reconquered himself with the swiftness of an Alexander, but not before a blush had spoiled his cheek.
    “Oh? Where was that?” His voice had an unmistakable quiver in it. He stabbed his pipe back into his mouth, lips thinned to disappearing.
    “Not a hundred yards from this house. In the night.”
    He had to remove the pipe from his lips again, if only to stop it from shaking.
    EVERY MINER was sullen as a Herod. A hundred of them there were, both men skilled in the ways of the pit and laborers whose tools were picks and shovels. Black-faced and black-handed, with all the color stolen from their clothes, they stood beneath a washwater sky and muttered. They reminded me of Afghanees from the hills, gathered to resist a foreign intruder. Such men never think outsiders good.
    Their wives and children, gray the lot of them, stood by. When the colliery whistle blew, the miners had come up from their gangways and galleries to join the lesser men who worked the yards, marching all together through the patch of company shanties, collecting their families, and trudging on up to the graveyard. Quiet as death they come, and hard-faced. Some were black as minstrels in a show, with white eyes, while others—the men who tended the mules or machinery—were but smudged in comparison. Breaker boys with hands cut raw stood in little bands, defiant of all authority in that hour, and yearning for the excitement of disaster. The great pack of them gathered just beyond the piled-stone wall that separated their dead from the rest of the world.
    We were encircled.
    My hired navvies dug and did not talk. They would not even glance up at the mob. The deputies, unwilling to a man, looked at their boots or made excuses to move closer to the horses. Only our teamster, perched upon his wagon, looked as though the world was as it should be, no better and no worse. He watched us all, with an expression more of apathy than alarm.
    As for my Christian self, I would not be daunted. A murmured threat is a cowardly thing, and a grim-set face is often an empty dare. A few of the Irish carried pick handles or sticks, butthey looked more troubled than confident to me. And duty must be done, no matter the cost. I met the eyes that searched me out from the tattered ranks of the crowd, returning every gaze until it weakened.
    I knew those faces. I am not so hard as that white-haired priest would have me, and I know the Irish are human, if truculent and wanting a proper scrub. I do not mean to suggest the least indulgence. I am no friend to tumult and disorder. I know full well the Irish tend to vice, nor would I wish such neighbors for my family. But I wished the Irish no harm.
    Their leanness and their rags make me uneasy, see. Speaking as a Christian, who has read his Bible through, and more than once. Simple enough it is to condemn, when a fellow knows his belly will be filled. We overlook our brother’s plight, so long as we may banish him from view. The priest was right about that much. Those miners and their families, pale to a wasting and coughing in the cold, might have liked to hang me from a tree. Yet, I could not hate them any more than fear them. The Irish are a burden we must shoulder, although you will agree they must behave.
    I think my true emotion was “embarrassment” that day. Although I cannot explain the reason why. My thoughts were as confused as when I make an effort to read in Mr. Emerson, whose genius lies beyond my comprehension.
    Oh, the Irish.
    I thought of the green flag of their volunteers, climbing the slope across Antietam