When what befalls us, that thread of life with all its fragile choices, knits into one irreversible web -- forcing us to face an evil that infiltrates the recess of any man, even in the shadow of our selves -- we are at once, alone and then also, savagely, part of the whole.  –Malachy Leslie, Blacksmith, 1832.

 

 

P R O L O G U E

 

Chester County Pennsylvania 1889

 

According to Nona, the chapel nurse, what the men left behind were their families. What they left behind were their lives. Their loves. “They existed in a nothing but squalor. Starvation.  And their desperations rooted them closer to their homeland, she said. “It was a kind of ancient, poetic loyalty. I always admired this,” she said. “’Tis a kind of devotion that crystallizes a soul.”

But the men and their families were trapped inside an intricate history, the kind that doesn’t unravel itself properly. Nona’s eyes shone when she spoke.  “They were as ravaged as ferals.” her voice pitched with indignation.  “They sailed here to America, deposited directly down into our very own Chester County and as our Lord’s fate would have it, for whatever his purposes, they lived in the midst of the same hateful acts as they did in their own country.  Aye, existing amid spirit-crushing blows, scraping for the hard labor that breaks ordinary men’s backs.”  Nona paused here, awaiting some response. “Right here under our noses,” she continued. “And through the gifts of our Lord, the lads were tempered,” she’d said, “by a grace of their own making -- sharp tongues, lively character, and poetry in some.”

Yes, according to Nona MacIntyre, they came as weavers and farmers, laborers and blacksmiths.  Some were married, leaving behind wives with too many children. Their women screaming as they did, raising their babies above their heads, while the men boarded ships for the new land.  America! Others were thieves and charlatans, fiddlers and scamps, bringing with them little more than the ragged clothes on their backs.  They came from the Ulster mostly. Tyrone, Donegal. A few from Derry. In two months time, they crossed the Atlantic in a Newcastle Barque stuffed with the bodies of dreamers. There were three births.  Seven deaths.  Ugly deaths, she’d said. Long, cruel.

The men became known as Pennsylvania’s Irish; railway men working the Pacific and Columbia line. They labored under the collective orders of contractors, politicos, railroad upstarts. All on the most dangerous mile imaginable. Between them ran that invisible cord of history, Protestant and Catholic, farmer or tenant, each sharing an ephemeral halo of experience, the kind that illuminates and joins seemingly disparate folk into threads of kinship. Ties that bind they say.  And for these men who left Ireland, it came in the shape of a dream, the American dream -- that great and wondrous hope.  And yet, while virtues such as hope and dreams fasten tight the bonds of the dissimilar, so too can terrible things.  Like war or terror.  And plague.

There were the three of us from the Sisters of Charity.  During that time, I worked under Nona while she tended to the men who fell ill with the cholera of 1832. Working in the sweat of summer, we Sisters moved between the canopied tents and a narrow shanty near the edge of the work site. There were long periods of silence tendering the sick, supporting their path toward healing or death.  No one could predict which it would be. Sometimes I recited the vows I had taken and of course, we all prayed.  Every day.  Even during the ugliest part of it.  Sacred obligation came as a relief to us in such terrible times.  It was Nona who looked after the blacksmith first.

The blacksmith was Malachy Leslie but everyone knew him as Mal.  He had a fondness for reminding us -- even through bitter fevers -- of how his ancestors were once the prophets and kings of the Gael. He mumbled that, as far as he was concerned, he’d had neither prophecy nor an ounce of nobility in him. But for this, who could be sure?  Malachy ran the blacksmith station at the end of camp.  He stood easy, over six feet tall, a man with a large round head and a small recessed chin.  His arms looked as sturdy as tree trunks and when Nona took her breaks from him, I stood over to his bed and stared at the power in him.

The inside of his forearms were marked with a mass of burns, scars all up and down like a geographer’s map.  Some were new and pink, other marks looked older.  There was one in the shape of a Celtic circle up near his shoulder, as if he had been branded like a piece of cattle.  Sometimes when Mal came awake, he murmured about the tragedy of lives cut short and the depravities of men -- all stories revolving around Duffy’s Cut.

When he fell into fever, I would stand over Malachy Leslie and listen to him breathe.  He breathed a heavy man’s breath, whistling, thick-like. I used to wonder then if I would be standing over him when he took his last. His last breath, that is. I imagined what that might be like.  At a time when no one had yet died on me, it seemed natural to wonder about such things.  I was there for the Lord’s work, to take care of others. I suppose I shouldn’t have really worried on the matter much. During the cholera, I wondered if a soul’s passing would be terrifying, like a fire-y brimstone igniting a spark in the soul, or if it would be like the saints and angels laying their hands upon you, calming the way. After the first one died, I scarcely remembering feeling anything in particular.  I do remember looking up to see a sweet hummingbird stationing right at my sight line just outside the shanty opening. I was thankful for that.

 

Death came to little more than half of them that came down with the cholera but even for those who survived, it proved a hideous and grotesque condition. It took weeks, even months to recover. Aside from listening to Malachy Leslie breath, I mostly washed the filthy linens and that of the others. I made a weak porridge for them to sip even though it seemed so hard for the very sick to keep it down. The cholera had taken so many and for those who managed to survive, they were like God’s living miracles to us.  Malachy Leslie was like that.

When Mal went in and out of the worst of his fever, he muttered fragments about the terror on the railway.  There again, Mile 59.  Something about the sway of the wicked and if his ancients might have seen such a horror from the skies.  He spoke of a man named Rooney. He asked, would the good Lord put down the wicked?  None of us were sure what to make of this but we all knew Mile 59.

Duffy’s Cut they called it. The cut was a deep set ravine, that, in order to lay down track, this gap had to be filled. Instead of building an expensive bridge to span the space, the men – even some free men of color – dug up a nearby hill and filled that empty ravine themselves. They were dirt movers. Human excavators. Malachy talked about pick axes flying and the swinging of spades.  From time to time, Nona would come in and check Mal’s ¬¬¬color, feeling for a pulse.  Sometimes he cried out, “Gabby, someone’s shot! Gabby? Surely it seemed as if he were there once again at Mile 59. It scene frightened me, seeing such a man of strength so broken and frail and wasted as he was. We three prayed for him right then and there, Nona, Letty and myself and it was only awhile later that the news came winding down to us in bits and pieces. The men had gone missing.

One day, after conquering one of the worst of his fevers, Malachy Leslie told the story to Nona while I fetched water from the nearby creek.  It seemed then that the story lingered at the crossroads of confusion and memory, fever and nightmare – all while he fought an illness that so savagely wrecks the whole of any man. But somewhere though, in the essence of Malachy’s ordeal, lingered the truth, and in that truth, there remained a mystery. Something about Malachy himself assured us all that the story of their deaths must have been rooted in a measure of fact. And whether fact or fiction, I cannot say for sure but the story ignites my imagination still.

For my own account, I’ll have to rely on a limited flair for remembrance in recalling those details from so long ago.  It would be remiss to of me not to qualify my own good-natured tendency toward filling in the pale stretches.  Some might say it’s the Irish in me drawing a sentimental view, but I say, the whole of any story and what meaning might be found, isn’t revealed in the seed of it, but sometimes instead, on the outside of that shell. Right in front of our own eyes. That meaning for the men of Duffy’s Cut, remains in me still. It’s resting tranquil and firm -- waiting to be shaped from its infinite mystery into a cataclysmic whole.