The man was tall...
six feet, at least... maybe seven.
Or was he floating a foot or two above our hunter green carpet? Most of his face was hidden by a shaggy
black beard and handlebar mustache.
But his... oh, Christ almighty, those eyes. They were two glowing coals, each one orange, shimmering and
radiating from a deep black socket, almost like the craters of two
recently-active volcanoes. Or ---
it occurred to me later --- two glowing embers of anthracite coal in some 19th
century fireplace. And the
mouth. It was open about half way
and what I could see of the inside was bright and bloody red.
The body, which
walked or floated slowly toward the foot of the bed, was dressed in a black,
funereal suit of rough wool. The
sleeves of the coat were too short and the long, powerful-looking arms hung
down at the man's side, the ghostly white fingers fully extended but relaxed. Except for the eyes and mouth, the
face, which had an exceptionally high forehead crowned by a thinning crop of
ill-cut black hair, was so white that I could have believed it had been dusted
with flour.
The specter did not
so much speak as moan its message, which sounded to me like "Juice
dish." The words meant
nothing, yet the voice frightened me even more than the messenger's appearance. I tried to kick off the covers,
intending to leap out of the bed and run for it. In my panic, as I was a little ashamed to recall later, I
gave no thought to Judy, asleep beside me in our queen-sized bed.
I found that, despite
kicking and flailing my arms and legs like the panic-stricken coward I was, I
couldn't get the bed clothes off my body nor extricate myself from the
bed. The apparition was hovering
directly above me, still moaning "Juice dish, Juice dish," while I
too moaned and wailed like some Irish banshee in a fairy tale, when I heard a
third voice in my right ear. It
was a soft and gentle female voice amidst all the male caterwauling that seemed
to fill up the small dark space of the bedroom. At first I hardly heard it. But, accompanied by a gentle yet firm shaking of my
trembling right shoulder, it persisted until it got through to the agitated
recesses of my frantic brain.
"Ned," the
gentle voice said. "Ned,
darling. Wake up. It's all right. You're having a dream. Ned, wake up," it insisted.
I discovered that I
could sit upright. And so, I
did. I sat bolt upright in bed and
the blanket and sheet fell down into my lap.
The rescuing female
voice, I was happy to hear, was still there in my right ear, which seemed the
only sane part of my head.
"Ned, wake up,"
it persisted. "You're having
a nightmare."
I
turned and was somewhat startled to see my wife beside me, her soft, plump hand
holding and gently shaking my shoulder.
"It's
all right, honey. Just wake up
now. Okay?"
Suddenly, a terrible
crashing noise drowned her out. I
looked up and saw that an elephant had appeared behind the human specter. It filled the space above me and caused
me to gasp for breath. Its trunk
slid between the ghoul’s legs and lifted him onto its back. Our bedroom ceiling and even our roof
were gone now. The elephant
bellowed. I think I bellowed, too.
Then Judy’s
voice was in my ear again. “Ned,
wake up, honey.” Then, more
urgently, “Wake up!”
I turned and looked
into the big, green-gray eyes that were just a few inches from my sweat-covered
face. The two big tears, one
dangling precariously from the corner of each of those warm, reassuring eyes,
looked to me like tiny crystal balls.
They caught the light coming in from the electric candle on the table in
the hallway. I felt relief flood
over and down through me. My whole tense, stiffened body relaxed. I'm surprised, thinking back, that I
didn't just collapse like a pile of cloth.
Then I remembered my
ghastly visitor. I snapped my head
back toward the ceiling. There was
nothing there, except our ceiling fan, rotating slowly, creating shimmering
shadows as its blades alternately reflected the soft, yellowish light from the
hall. I figured our roof was back
as well.
"It was
Kehoe," I finally spoke to Judy.
"It was Black Jack."
Her gentle voice did
not contradict this mad assertion.
As if I had told her that Archie had just called, she asked in
matter-of-fact tones, "What did he want, honey?"
"I'm not
sure," I replied, her calmness catching, my own tone of voice level and
fairly soft. "I don't know.
Something about juice, I think."
"Juice?" Judy was
as puzzled as I. Or was she amused
and just pretending to be interested, as she did sometimes when I tried to tell
her about some of my cases?
"What about juice, darling?"
"Don't
know," I mumbled, as an irresistible urge to get back to sleep came over
me. I checked the clock on my
night stand: 2:02 AM was the digital reading. "I don't know.
Maybe he was thirsty."
PART
ONE: THE MOLLY MAGUIRES
CHAPTER
ONE (1987)
It's the
summer of 1987 and I'm seventeen years old. We're careening along Interstate 90, heading west through
South Dakota. I'm driving, Mom is
riding shotgun and keeping careful tabs on the quality of my driving. "Slow down, Ned. Let him pass you." "Watch out. Is that a motorcycle I see ahead
there? Why don't they make them
wear proper helmets out here?"
I'm doing my best to
ignore her, as well as my fourteen-year-old sister, Katy, who is providing us
with sporadic dramatic readings from something she just purchased called the
"I Kid-You-Not Road Atlas."
"Hey,
Ned-o," she says, "Listen to this. In Nebraska it's illegal for a barber to shave a customer's
chest hair."
I reach for the
volume knob on the radio-tape player and turn up the sound another notch. Though Mom is only allowing us to
listen to classical music ("Both for my sanity and so you two cultural
Neanderthals learn something during all the hours we'll be cooped up in the
van."), Brahms in both ears is better than Mom in one and Katy in the
other.
"Neddy, are you
listening?" Katy is sprawled
across the middle bench of the Plymouth Voyager that Pop drove
brand-spanking-new from the showroom just three days ago. "In Arkansas it's illegal to
blindfold cows on highways."
"Oh, my
God," exclaims Mom at that moment.
"Is that a cow up there on the road?"
"No, Mom,"
I respond. "It's just another
biker."
"Well, don't
pass him. Your father says
motorcycles are liability lightning rods." Whatever that means, I think to myself.
"In Gainesville,
Georgia, it's illegal to eat chicken with a fork," Katy plows on, giggling
softly from time to time as well.
I give up trying to ignore the two females in my life.
The Old Man, however,
is having no such problem. Having
curled his bulk into a big ball on the back bench of our new van, he is quietly
snoring away, oblivious to Katy's dramatic reading of unusual American laws and
Mom's running commentary on road conditions and the quality of my driving.
Like the van, the
trip was Archie's idea. Both were
the products of a new prosperity which had visited the McAdoo family of
Havertown, Pennsylvania, in the wake of my Dad's successful settlement last
August of a somewhat sensational (at least locally) lawsuit. The case involved AIDS discrimination
in employment... something of a
novelty in those days; the Old Man had successfully represented the plaintiff.
But the real news was that the guy killed himself in the midst of the
litigation. No matter... Pop's
publicity was excellent.
Always a solo
practitioner, Archie had experienced a steady stream of new clients, including
a labor union which had obtained his continuing counsel on employment law
issues in return for a fairly handsome monthly retainer. So busy had he become that he had hired
a part-time law clerk, a third year student from nearby Widener Law School,
whom he had high hopes of being able to hire on a full-time basis after she
graduated and passed the Pennsylvania bar.
And seemingly
despite, rather than because, of Pop's notoriety as the successful advocate of
a gay HIV victim, Mom's Christmas present from her employer, Regional
Econometric Forecasting Group, at the end of 1986 had been a promotion from
controller to chief financial officer.
In short, the "long green", as Archie had taken to calling it,
was rolling in. And, so, my Dad
had decided it was time for the famiglia McAdoo to take a "real
vacation."
In fact our
family vacations to date had all been of the classic Havertonian variety: a
week, two if we were really lucky, at the Jersey Shore. The more affluent your folks, the
closer to the beach was your rented house. The McAdoos usually had a pretty long walk to the
shoreline. Only in the past four
or five years --- and then only because Mom had been promoted in 1982 from head
bookkeeper to controller at REF Group--- did Katy and I discover how awesome it
is to have a door that opens right out onto the dunes, the beach and the
breaking waves. But, Mom, ever the
frugal faction in her sometimes fractious marriage to my Dad, had continued to
insist that a substantial portion of her salary be socked away for our college
educations and their retirement at some indeterminate time beyond that.
Consequently, even with
Dad's substantial fee from the HIV settlement, and the significant, steady
increase in his income after that, Mom initially had resisted Archie's idea of
a "real vacation to show the kids America."
Archie had lobbied
hard and long. But I don't think
his alternating rounds of cajoling and badgering would have moved Mom, if
Maggie Mulhearn hadn't come into the picture. I think it was in mid-January that she approached Pop about
representing her. Since the
beginning of the New Year, Archie occupied a four-room office suite in a
reconditioned old house, just a few blocks from our home. It had once been a branch location of
the Haverford Township Library, and was now a 'professional building' of
sorts. Another solo practitioner,
Bernard "Bail Bond" Brennan, and an Indian chiropractor, Dr.
Something Singh, occupied the two other, somewhat-larger suites in the
building.
It was for the best
that Maggie Mulhearn had turned up there and not in Pop's old office at home
--- which had now reverted to its intended function of dining room, complete
with antique table, chairs and sideboard, Mom's Christmas-cum-Promotion present
to herself --- because Maggie Mulhearn, when I got a look at her a couple of
months later, proved to be a Celtic heart-stopper.
Flaming red hair,
which was either naturally curly or permed into the most romantic mane of
bouncing ringlets my teenaged eyes had ever seen, topped a flawlessly smooth,
white complexion. A prominent nose
flanked by two big, radiant blue eyes, and underlined by full, pouting lips
came together to create an effect far greater than the mere sum of the
parts. Maybe much of the beauty
came from within. I know now that
can sometimes be the case. Back
then I didn't analyze, I just appreciated.
Maggie Mulhearn was
one of those Irish women who freckled, rather than tanned, in the summer, and
then held onto some of those freckles on her nose and high cheekbones all year
long. The freckles made her look
adolescent --- and therefore just that much more attractive to little 'ol
teenage me --- though she was 26 or 27 when she approached Archie in the winter
of '87 with her unusual project.
Maggie Mulhearn, as
Archie recalls vividly her telling him during their first consultation, was a
direct descendant of Black Jack Kehoe.
Film enthusiasts, like my Mom, remembered that the famous Scotch actor
Sean Connery had played Black Jack in a 1970 film called "The Molly
Maguires." In that movie,
filmed by Paramount Pictures in a little Pennsylvania coal town about 90 miles
north of Philadelphia, Kehoe is portrayed as the leader of a secret society
that is remembered for wreaking murder and mayhem on the coal mine owners and
supervisors who exploited their Irish miners and laborers in the 1870s.
"That's not
true," Maggie Mulhearn had earnestly explained to Archie, her big, sincere
eyes starring straight into his, until (he told me much later) he had to break
the spell by turning and making a note on his legal pad.
"My great great
grandfather was a labor leader and a politician," she continued. "The capitalists framed him
because he and his union were becoming too powerful. His political organization was gaining too much influence in
the mine patches." The
mention of "capitalists" led Pop to detect a rare 1980s leftist
concealed beneath the affluent --- in fact, independently wealthy --- Ms
Mulhearn.
After allowing the
ebullient Maggie to chatter on about Pinkerton detectives and biased juries and
agents provocateurs, Archie finally
tore his watery, middle-aged eyes from her seductive gaze and inquired,
"What would you like me to do about all this? To me it sounds as if you have the material here for a very
good book, Ms Mulhearn. Perhaps
you should take a stab at writing it.
Or maybe you could find a journalist, or maybe an historian at one of
the local universities, who would have an interest in writing all this up. But that's not me... I'm just a
lawyer." I can see Dad, who
hates to tell a client or potential client --- especially one as attractive as
Maggie Mulhearn --- “no,” shifting uneasily from one big buttock to the other
and staring at his legal pad or his size 12-trip-D shoes as he says this.
Maggie Mulhearn
at this point in the consultation became perhaps a little impatient with what
was, however unintended by my Father, a rather patronizing statement of the
obvious. Just as clearly I can see
her leaning forward and putting her determined face so close to the listener's
that in this instance my slightly embarrassed Dad had no choice but to meet her
eyes with his own limpid gray pools.
"I know you're a
lawyer, Mr. McAdoo," she pressed on.
"And a very good one from things I've read and heard lately. And it's a lawyer I want and need. I don't want my great great
grandfather's story told again. I
want him pardoned."
For some reason he
could never quite articulate, Archie felt compelled to write her words down on
his legal pad, very precisely. As
I've said, I think he couldn't stand to stare into those extraordinary eyes for
too long and used his note taking as a means of escape from them.
"Well, justice,
they say, is blind," my Dad replied lamely, not knowing what to make of
this beguiling, insistent young woman, who seemed determined to retain his
services to somehow reopen a case that had climaxed in an official execution
some hundred and ten years earlier.
"Sometimes it loses sight of the truth, and eventually the truth is
lost forever."
"That's just
it," insisted Maggie Mulhearn. "Do you mind if I smoke?" She pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes and
a cheap Bic butane lighter from her purse and lit up before Archie, a bit
surprised that such a "wholesome" (his word) "girl" (also
his) smoked (unfiltered cigarettes at that!), could say no. "That's it exactly: I want the
world, and especially the justice system, to remove the blindfolds and see my
great great granddad's innocence.
And you're the lawyer who can do it... I think."
At last Archie turned
away from his legal pad, swiveling his creaky oak sheriff's chair so that he
faced his would-be client squarely.
He turned so abruptly toward her that his reward was a face full of
exhaled cigarette smoke.
"Oh, dear. I'm so sorry," said the persistent
Ms Mulhearn.
"That's all
right," my Dad half gasped.
"Look, I still think a good historian is..." He was stopped in mid sentence by the
check which she apparently had drawn from her purse along with the
cigarettes. Made out in large
green letters, the draft was for ten thousand dollars on the First Pennsylvania
Bank.
"Perhaps this will
express my seriousness, Mr. McAdoo," she stated flatly, holding the beige
colored check with its Kelly green ink, almost directly under my Dad's bulbous
nose... which no doubt could very nearly smell the money. "I am authorizing you, as my
lawyer, to travel wherever you feel in your judgment you should, examine
whatever relevant records you can locate --- starting with a good deal of
material I have in the trunk of my car right now --- and when you have
satisfied yourself of Black Jack Kehoe's innocence, institute whatever
proceedings, or lobbying or whatever is required to have him pardoned."
Well, you've probably
guessed that Pop took the check and the... what? The case? Not
really. "Assignment" is
what we have always called it, down to the present day. He also walked out to Maggie Mulhearn's
car... it proved to be a Porsche ... and took custody of two cardboard boxes
that she had jammed into its tiny boot.
The boxes, appropriately labeled "Jameson's Irish Whiskey" and
obviously obtained from a liquor store, were not filled with spirits. Or were they? The boxes, when Archie opened them after his new client had
departed, where stuffed with books, articles and notes written in a neat,
rather large penmanship that matched the handwriting on the green and beige
check.
Archie walked the check
down to the bank, then stopped on the way back at MacDonald's and wolfed down
two Big Macs, a large order of fries and a strawberry shake in hearty
celebration of this latest windfall from his new found reputation. On the way back to the office he
distractedly munched one of Mickey D's apple pies.
Back in his office,
seated not in the hard sheriff's chair but rather in a cracked-leather easy
chair in the corner near the window, he idly browsed through the materials in
the first Jameson's crate.
Selecting a battered paperback, "The Molly Maguires" by a
college professor named Wayne Broehl, he began reading. But soon the combination of warm
sunlight streaming in the window with its western exposure, and the fairly massive
amount of pure MacDonald's fat in my Father's stomach, sent Archie swirling
downward into a somnambulant state from which he could not pull out. Broehl's tome resting in his ample lap,
the great, crusading lawyer of Stanley Avenue, Havertown, Pennsylvania, snored
rather delicately as he slept the remainder of the afternoon away.
CHAPTER
TWO (1987)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homestead_riot_harpers_3c26046v.png
“Is
Violence Ever Justified?”
The Black activist H
Rap Brown has called violence “as American as cherry pie.” Nowhere has this claim enjoyed greater
cachet than in labor-management relations. The Pullman Strike, the Haymarket Riot, the Homestead
Strike, the bombing of the Los Angeles Times Building... these murderous
confrontations characterized the war between labor and capital around the close
of the 19th and the start of the 20th centuries.
Predating --- and
prefiguring --- these well-known incidents in America’s labor history are the
enigmatic events that occurred in the hard coal region of central-eastern
Pennsylvania from 1865 through 1876.
Sometimes archaically called “the Molly Maguire Riots” (there were no
riots as we understand that word today), this protracted conflict accounted for
16 murders, followed by 20 hangings... or what one might call state-sanctioned
homicides.
Since the days when
20 so-called Molly Maguires were marched to the gallows in Pottsville, Hazleton
and Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania between 1876 and 1878, historians and writers
have quarreled vehemently over whether these men were organized terrorists or
innocent victims ala Sacco and Vanzetti.
Detractors point to a long tradition in the west of Ireland of
Whiteboys, Ribbonmen and other vigilante groups, which tradition is said to
have spawned the killings, beatings and arsons in the anthracite coal fields
after these self-same nightriders, or their progeny, immigrated to the
U.S. Conversely, left-leaning
commentators have contended that the hanged Irishmen were labor leaders and
politicians targeted by the mining interests for liquidation.
Let us assume for the
sake of argument that the Molly Maguires really were what the Pinkerton
detectives and the county prosecutors claimed they were: a secret society, founded in County
Donegal to terrorize landlords and their agents, and transplanted to the
Pennsylvania coal fields, where they launched a reign of terror --- murders,
assaults, and arsons --- in the 1860s and 1870s. If all of that were true, would it not also have been
justified?
No
American ever raises doubts about the justice of the Boston Tea Party. If those Boston patriots were morally
entitled to dump the private property of English merchants into the ocean, then
the equally-aggrieved Irish coal miners of a century later surely were entitled
to rip up railroad tracks and burn down an occasional colliery.
Though
the 19th century Catholic Church condemned the Molly Maguires, no Christian
ever doubted Jesus Christ’s justification in throwing the money lenders out of
the Temple in Jerusalem. Arguably
the early Christian church was a band of conspirators striving to displace the
state religion and the official gods of the Roman Empire, as well as the Jewish
faith from which their cabalistic schism had sprung. So was the Church not hypocritical in condemning the
Mollies?
And is not even
homicide sometimes justifiable?
The law has always recognized my right to defend my home against
intruders, even to the point of using deadly force. And if a man may fire his gun to protect his family from another
who is intent on entering his home and wreaking deadly harm, he ought to be
able to fire that same gun at the man who is intent on slowly murdering his
family by means of starvation wages.
No less a legal mind
than the great Clarence Darrow made similar arguments in defense of violent
union behavior a little later in the last century.
Maggie Mulhearn, “Is Violence Ever Justified?”
RAMPARTS, June 1987, page 22.
