“Can you tell me?”
“You truly want to hear?”
“Yes,” I said, the ghost soldier still in mind, “I do.”
She talked for a long while, a rush of words spilling softly. She did not cry, though she came close. Colm O’Neill joined Meagher’s Irish Brigade in 1862 and marched off under summer skies to rousing music and cheers. Two months later, one September afternoon, he sprawled into oblivion at Antietam. It was, Cait had learned, one of the war’s bloodiest—and stupidest—military engagements. The Irish boys were ordered to attack Longstreet’s rebels dug in along a sunken road soon to be called Bloody Lane. In front of it the Confederates had laid fence rails. These positions, lying just beyond the crest of a hill, could not be hit effectively by rifle fire or even cannon. More rebels were concealed in a cornfield behind the forward lines, with artillery trained for maximum devastation. It was a death trap.
The brigade moved toward the crest. Flags with the golden harp of Eire fluttered beside the Stars and Stripes in the autumn sunlight. So many of those green banners were shot to tatters that boys set leafy sprigs in their caps so that they could fight and die beneath the green. They launched themselves into an inferno. The hill exploded in fire and smoke, eruptions of earth, deafening noise. Musket fire raked them. Cannon volleys decimated them. In the first minutes, half the Sixty-third New York lay slaughtered. The brigade ran out of ammunition only a hundred yards from Bloody Lane, held its position in the maelstrom, was reinforced, charged blindly again. And again. Of the first twelve hundred, less than five hundred still lived. They fought on. Colm was in the final advance which cleared the last of the enemy from Bloody Lane, by then so filled with corpses it no longer served as a trench. They had done the superhuman, but the Union commander, cautious McClellan, failed to commit reserves for the decisive blow. Lee’s army limped away, still intact. All the valiant Irish lads, some would claim, had died for nothing. Among the corpses in the woods near Bloody Lane was that of Colm O’Neill.
“I have his medal for bravery,” said Cait. “I keep it with his letters. But there was nothing brave about that place. The wind sighed in the trees. There was desolation. And death. And I stood there with Colm’s son inside me.”
And finally she lowered her head and wept. She did not resist when I took her hand. I felt the work-roughened pads of her fingers and the soft skin on top and tried to think of some comfort to offer.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping at tears. “I scarcely do this now.”
“It’s okay.”
She looked up at me. “You’re a kindly man, Samuel.”
I squeezed her hand. “Since you’re not cooking for boarders, how about coming to tomorrow’s game? Harry’s wife and little girls will be there. We could eat afterward.”
“Perhaps,” she said, rising. “But only after you have answered a question.”
“Anything.”
“Wait,” she said, and left the kitchen. She returned and handed me a tintype. I held its cardboard frame carefully, aware of sensations building and weaving within me, a thin piping fugue. I saw the handsome features of a dark-haired boy about twenty. She didn’t tell me who he was. She didn’t need to. I stared into the laughing eyes, half expecting to feel the inexplicable force Cait’s portrait had exerted on me. But there were only the piping sensations.
“What’s your question?” I said, glancing up to find her eyes fixed on me.
“I have to know.” Her voice was controlled. “Are you him?”
It stunned me. And yet I think I’d almost anticipated it. Was I Colm? So simple. A confusion of possibilities whirled in my brain. Why did she think I might be? What about her yellow dress?
“If I answer without knowing everything involved,” I said slowly, “will you accept it without explanation?”
Yes,” she said. “For now.”
Then, for now, as best I can honestly tell, no, I’m not Colm O’Neill.”
She swallowed and looked away.
“And if I’d said yes?” I asked.
She turned back, and, very gradually, the corners of her mouth curved upward. Some of the heaviness in the room dissolved.
“I suppose I would still attend your match tomorrow,” she said. “But it would be vastly different, would it not?”
She sat beside Carrie Wright in the first row of the Grand Duchess. With only several hundred spectators on hand, Cait was easy to spot. And I was not alone in appreciating her ebony hair, pale features, and striking eyes.
“Who’s the dark beauty next to Harry’s missus?” Allison asked.
“Andy’s sister,” said Sweasy. “Prettiest lass ever in Newark. Us kids looked up to her like a queen. Ain’t seen her in years.”
“Remember, Sweaze, how she’d tell me, ‘Don’t let Charles stray into trouble’?” Andy said, laughing.
“Hell, I didn’t stray,” Sweasy said. “I went looking!”
“She’s the true goods,” said George, eyeing Cait in a way I didn’t like at all. “Whyn’t you introduce me after the match, Andy?”
“Sam’s ahead of you,” he replied. “Cait’s never come here just to see me play.”
“Sam?” George, sounding startled, appraised me curiously. Sweasy shot me a malevolent stare before turning abruptly toward the field. I gathered he wasn’t overjoyed with Cait’s taste either.
One of our problems on the diamond that afternoon was that the Central Citys weren’t yet convinced of our superiority.
The other was that Brainard never showed up.
The game, which the Enquirer would call the “poorest ever played in the West,” was long and frustrating. With Allison again begging off catching, Harry started Waterman behind the plate, Allison in right, Mac in center, and me at third. Early on, after a liner shot between my legs, Harry switched me with Allison. The Central Citys teed off on Harry’s floaters. He tried George and
