Free A Passionate Girl by Thomas Fleming

the river bottoms. Dad says he settled there because it reminded him of Ireland. And because he met an Irish beauty. Ma’s maiden name was O’Gara. Our grass ain’t as green as Ireland. Bluegrass, we call it. But it’s rich soil, good pasture for cattle and horses. Dad started raisin’ horses with the money he made from the tavern. Then he built a sawmill. Pretty soon he was close to the richest man in Pulaski. He got into politics with the Democrats and went to the legislature at Nashville. He decided he wanted me to be a gentleman. Wanted me to have a good education. So he sent me to the University of Virginia. I was there a year when the war started.
    â€œDad didn’t see nothin’ wrong with ownin’ slaves. Most of his friends in the legislature were from West Tennessee, down around Memphis, where they owned ’em by the hundreds. He said he’d never seen a slave treated as bad as he’d seen the Irish treated in Boston. So he threw in with the Confederates and told me to do likewise in Virginia.”
    â€œSo you were in it from the start.”
    â€œRight from Bull Run,” he said. “One of General Stuart’s cousins was in my class. He introduced me to him and I got a commission in his cavalry brigade. That’s where I spent the war, in Virginia with Stuart. He was the bravest man and the finest officer I ever saw. For a while we had a good old time. The ladies couldn’t do enough for us. General Stuart made sure we had the best of everything. We whacked the Yankees almost every time we felt like it. But they wouldn’t quit. They kept findin’ more men, no matter how many we killed or captured. Pretty soon they had officers, veterans, who knew how to maneuver cavalry as good as General Stuart. Our last fight was at Yellow Tavern, about six miles from Richmond. There were only four officers left in our regiment. The men and horses were half starved. The Yankees tore us apart, and one of their troopers killed General Stuart with a handgun. I carried him back to his tent. That was the saddest day of my life.
    â€œThe second saddest was the day I came home to Pulaski. I’d known what was happenin’ in Tennessee. The state split up, the east end goin’ with the Union, the west with the Confeds. In Middle Tennessee, where we were, people split off both ways. That made for a mean war, sometimes brothers from the same family goin’ on opposite sides. Old friends turnin’ enemies. But I never expected what I saw when I got off the train. Our tavern, our house, just heaps of burnt-out timbers. A Union mob’d done it, right after the Union Army come through, in 1862. Dad never told me. He figured I had enough trouble of my own. Then the Union politicians went to work on him. They dragged him in front of some court and convicted him of being a traitor and confiscated our horse farm, our sawmill, everything we owned. It broke Dad’s spirit. He died just before the war ended. His friends had to bury him with borrowed money.”
    â€œDear God, Dan, what you’ve been through,” I said. “How did you come to the Fenians?”
    â€œI didn’t have a cent. A friend of Dad’s sent me to John O’Neil, in Nashville. He was a Union officer, a cavalryman, runnin’ a pension agency for the Yankee army and recruitin’ Fenians on the side. He said I was just the sort of man they wanted and sent me to New York.”
    We were alone on the Manhattan ’s bow as Dan told me this story. My heart swelled with a great pity for him, as well as a kind of awe. He was only twenty-five years old, but he had seen more death and tasted more bitterness than most men of fifty. No wonder he dreamt of a great estate in Ireland if we were victorious. Life had raised him up and cast him down. Without the Fenians he would have to go back to where his father had begun, toiling at hard labor for a few dollars a day. How could I