Killing Down the Roman Line (24 page)

The house was dark. No vehicle in the driveway. Travis pushed open the door, knowing it would be unlocked.

“Mr. Corrigan?”

He didn’t expect a reply. Feeling his way through the pitch, to the west wall to where he knew the work lamp to be. Patting fingers down its base, he turned his eyes away and clicked it on. The array of lights lit the room and Travis dialled it back to a dull glow. He slumped into a chair and rubbed his burning ankle. He’d wait. Mr. Corrigan wouldn’t mind him being here.

Travis bored quickly. Up and snooping around, drawn immediately to the big shotgun on the mantelpiece. He traced a finger down the gun barrels, wanting desperately to pick it up but his dad had admonished him endlessly to never never never touch a gun unless he was present. He’d wait until Mr. Corrigan came back and ask to handle it. Hell, Mr. Corrigan would probably let him blast a few shells too.

Hobbling to the kitchen, he found a can of cola among the beer in the portable fridge. Travis sucked it back and kept snooping. A workbench had been set up on the east wall, tumbled with Mr. Corrigan’s tools. Hammers, crowbar and a rubber mallet, most of which he’d used himself to tear down walls and rip out the old wiring. A length of chain coiled loose. He lifted it, trailing the end to a big metal contraption. A wide base with two hoops of banded steel. Seeing the serrated teeth of the iron hoops, Travis realized what it was. A coyote trap, the kind that snapped the animal’s leg in those cruel looking teeth.

Weird. There weren’t coyotes in this part of the country, much less bears or wolves or anything else one would use the trap for. What did Mr. Corrigan want it for?

~

The rage festering in Jim’s gut had nowhere to go but the gas pedal. The argument replayed in his head over and over in a sickening loop, thinking up clever comebacks and cruel jabs but the loop ended with his hand striking his son’s face. The look in the boy’s eyes. Shock, then fear. Looking at him like he was some monster.

When the adrenaline burned off, all that anger curdled in his stomach. Jim pulled to the shoulder, tipped out of the cab and threw up on the gravel.

What the hell had he done?

Travis was born in March, thirteen days early. Holding the red-faced baby, Jim was humbled and awed and scared shitless. He made a silent vow to be the best dad he could be. Or at least better than his own father. They all do, sons vowing to euchre the father in legacy and honour. Wiping strings of mucous from his lips, Jim realized how disastrously he had failed. No better than his own vicious-tempered old man.

What is bred in the bone will never be out of the flesh.

Where the hell had he read that? Not long ago. A bumper sticker? No, an engraving. Whittled into the flagstone of the hearth at the old Corrigan place. Corrigan. Jim climbed back under the wheel and realized where his son had gotten the brass knuckles. Who else would have given a thirteen year-old a weapon like that?

The banner straddling the main drag crinkled in the breeze, welcoming all to the Heritage Festival. Cars lined both sides of the streets, chewing up all of the parking spaces. Tourists and locals traipsing along the sidewalks. Kate’s festival was a hit. Jim trawled past the smokers outside the Dublin House and swung down Newcastle Road towards the fair grounds.

The parking lot had cleared, a few hard-goers still trying to win prizes or swinging plastic cups in the beer garden. Jim stomped through the grass to the willow tree looking for Corrigan but the man had vanished along with his blasphemous display. The only thing left was the noose swinging from the branch and the charred ashes of the straw man.

He knew Corrigan wouldn’t be in the beer garden but to hell with it, he wanted a drink. He spotted Hitchens, crowding a picnic table alongside Murdy and a few others, but he steered for the bar. Ale sloshed into a plastic cup, he looked out over the picnic tables. Puddy’s regular patrons, hunkered down for the duration. God help them when the beer tent closed and they all raced out of the lot for last call at the Dublin.

The din was loud, everyone talking over one another. Except for the other lone drinker at the far end of the tent, a picnic table all to himself. Unfinished business.

“Hey Houdini. That was quite the vanishing act you pulled on me.”

Gallagher’s eyes lifted from his drink. “Jim.”

Jim leaned an elbow on the plastic gingham tablecloth. “Why’d you disappear on me the other night?”

“Trouble brews, I employ the wiser part of valour.”

“What’s that?”

“One’s legs.” The old man looked back into his drink.

“You said you had something to show me. About the Corrigan family.”

“Did I?” The old man’s brow stitched into a hundred creases. “That night’s a bit foggy.”

“You said you had proof.”

“I say a lot of things when I’m in my cups, Jimbo.” He swatted the notion away. “Idle talk, nothing more.”

Jim pushed the man’s cup away. “Show me.”

“Let it go, Jimmy. No good can come of it. Now gimme my drink before I knock your teeth in.”

Jim smiled, returned the cup to him. “Drink up. Then we’ll go.”

~

Gallagher rode shotgun, directing Jim back up Newcastle to Galway. Jim tried a little chitchat, asking the old man what he thought of the festival but Gallagher just grunted and jostled along on the bench seat.

“Take Hamilton, come up behind town hall.” Gallagher cocked a thumb at the next street. “We don’t want anyone seeing us.”

A naked bulb lit the loading dock at the rear of the town hall building. Next to it, a door marked as a staff entrance. To the left another door, unlit and unmarked.

Gallagher slid his legs out and disembarked slowly. Jim stifled the urge to lift the old man out like a toddler.

“This way.” Gallagher nodded to the unmarked door. He picked through a ring of keys, squinting in the squalid light.

“Do you want a hand?”

“Here.” He slotted the key into the lock and pulled the handle. A squeal of rust grinding together. “Watch your step.”

He patted the wall for the switch and a bulb popped on. Steps leading down and a brittle handrail that looked ready to fall. Gallagher grunted down each step, knees in agony, until they gained the landing.

Stacks lined both sides of a long room, shelves crowded with dusty boxes. Rows of folding chairs stacked against a wall. Enormous picture frames left to rot in the corner. Cobwebs and the damp smell of mould.

“What is all this?”

“Archives,” said Gallagher. “Records and documents. Land surveys and marriage records. Junk.”

Gallagher shuffled down the aisle. Jim let the old man lead the way at his glacial pace. He looked over the shelves, snooping. Old plaques and a broken bust of Churchill, a mounted stag’s head with its black marble eyes. Portraits of the queen shrouded in plastic sheeting. One shelf held nothing but globes, a dusty constellation of earths mapped out with dominions and empires that no longer existed. All of it cast in shafts of light bleeding through the stacks.

Gallagher snailed past it all to the far end of the room and stopped before a bookshelf. Tall but narrow, the wood yellowed with age. “Here,” he said, waving at the shelf. “Help me move this.”

“What for?”

“Just take your end.”

Jim pulled the shelf forward, scraping it across the gritty floor. Books tumbled and flopped open on the concrete. Jim gathered them up. “What exactly are you showing me?”

“Hidden things, buried long ago.” Gallagher straightened up, a hand to the small of his back. “My father was the magistrate for this township. As was his dad before him.”

“Magistrate?” Jim cocked an eyebrow. Old Gallagher had been the custodian for the town hall and library for thirty years before retiring. Or was forced to retire, according to him. He’d been a gravedigger too, as a younger man, and often told gruesome stories about what really happened to the dead at the Queen’s Lawn Cemetery out on the other side of river. “So what happened to you? Didn’t follow the old man into the family business?”

Gallagher wheezed, dust roiling around him. “Stuffed shirts like that, not for me. Corrupt too. You wouldn’t believe the shenanigans my old dad used to tell me. So no, I was not one for the family business. Preferred honest work myself. Digging bones out of the graveyard to make way for new ones was cleaner work.”

Something ran over Jim’s foot, nails ticking on the floor. Jim jumped, repulsed like a schoolgirl. “What the fuck was that?”

“Rats. The place is infested with them.” Gallagher laughed at him then nodded to the shelf, grasping his end. “One more tug, just a little further.”

They scraped the shelf another foot, Jim scouring the floor for more vermin. He circled but saw no more rats. The old man snickered at his little jig and Jim groused at him. “Just get on with it, for Chrissakes. Then we can get out of here.”

The old man lowered his bulk down to one knee, wincing as his arthritic knee touched the damp slab floor. Smoothing his palm over the clean patch of wall where the shelf had been. His fingertips traced a faint line in the stucco. He made a fist and banged the wall. The line deepened into a seam and Jim saw the patch of wall held a removable frame. A rectangle, three feet tall by two wide. Gallagher pushed one end in until the other end popped free. Shimmying the rectangle back and forth, he slid the false panel free. “Take this.”

Jim gripped the frame and leaned it against the shelf. On the wall before them gaped a rectangle of darkness. Gallagher reached into it and Jim winced, imagining the old man’s hands plunging into a nest of rats. The old man grunted and tugged, hauling something out of the breach. It tipped over the edge and thudded to the floor.

“What is that?”

Gallagher wiped his sleeve across the top, clearing the dust. A metal strongbox, girded in iron and studded with brass. The lid fixed with a tongue and hoop but no lock.

“Bad business.” Gallagher reached his hand out to Jim. “Help me up. This cold floor is murdering me.”

Jim steadied him as the old man swayed on bad legs. Gallagher nodded to their find and Jim lifted the strongbox to a workbench. A lamp was switched on. Jim flipped the lid up and stepped back, expecting to see more vermin lunging for his throat with evil little teeth. A long-legged spider crawled up the lip and disappeared down the side. Nothing more.

Gallagher reached in and pulled out a folio of cracked leather tied with butcher’s string. He worked the knot loose and folded back the cover. The leather cracked, fragmenting away. Laid bare to the lamplight was a stack of paper, brittle as papyrus. The old man coughed. “Read it.”

Jim didn’t move. The old man held the page out to him. A list, written in a flowing cursive. The date at the top read 1898.

“The names of the men charged in the murder of the Corrigan family,” Gallagher said. “Read it.”

Jim studied the calligraphy, deciphering as best he could and read aloud. “Jonathan Hitchens, Edward McGrath, James Puddycombe, Thomas Farrell, William Berryhill…” He dropped the paper like it was poison, letting fall back to the workbench. He looked at Gallagher. “All of these men were charged? Why is this here? Why is there no record of this?”

Gallagher coughed again. “The magistrate of the time decided to keep it secret.”

“Your great-grandfather?”

“Yes.”

Jim swallowed. The taste of dust on his teeth. “Were they guilty?”

The old man nodded.

“But there was no trial.” Jim shook his head, denying it. “No charges were ever laid.”

“It was done quietly. Sort of a gentlemen’s agreement until the authorities got to the bottom of it. The charges were later dismissed.” He brushed the dust from his hands. “Everyone knew these men were guilty but they kept mum. A story sprang up about a gang of escaped convicts, running loose over the countryside. Everyone went along with the lie.”

Jim backed away from it. “Then why the list? If there was no trial, no charges, why is there this list?”

“There was still an investigation. The guilty parties couldn’t hold their tongues and all were brought before the magistrate.” Gallagher sifted the pages in the folio. “These are all confessions. Judge Charlton Gallagher made each and every man dictate and sign. Then he put them all into this box and hid the damn thing away.”

Jim shook his head again, as if he could wish it all away. “Why? Why would he cover it up like this?”

“To keep the peace. There’s more than twenty names on that list. And those are just the men who committed the deed. Add to that everyone who knew what had happened, that’s half the town.” Gallagher slipped a page free from the pile and held it up. “Here. You need to see this.”

“I’ve seen enough.”

“Read it,” Gallagher scolded him. “The name at the bottom.”

Jim took the document, the paper like onionskin in his fingers. The script was cramped and hard to decipher. Then it became crystal clear. “Robertson James Hawkshaw.”

The old man nodded. “Your ancestor. Robbie Hawkshaw was the ringleader of the vigilante group. He led the assault on the Corrigan home that night.”

February 28, 1898

I, Robertson James Hawkshaw, did wilfully and with malice commit murder and violence to the family of James Orin and Mary Agnes Corrigan and their children; John James, Thomas Finn, Michael Patrick and Bridgette Mary Corrigan.

Murder, so help me God, was not my intention that night. The Vigilance Peace Society had assembled in John Murdy’s tavern to discuss plans to protect ourselves from our tormentors. James Corrigan and his sons, Thomas and Michael, were to give depositions in their lawsuits against myself, Fergus Hitchens and Tom Berryhill. Our intentions that evening were simply to warn the Corrigan men not to depose and frighten them into dismissing their various legal pursuits.

The meeting at the tavern adjourned just before midnight and we resolved to reconvene at the Roman Line school house within the hour. Twenty-one of us in all crowded into that little building. James Corrigan and myself had built that school house long ago, back before the feuding began, before the Corrigans began their campaigns of abuse and intimidation. Charley Puddycombe brought a bottle, the rest of us brought what weapons we had or could obtain.