First chapter of novel in progress

Chapter One

The second Jack Kehoe laid eyes on McKenna, he pegged him for a snitch. Not just because he was a stranger in a coal town where strangers were unknown. Not because there was some obvious tell.

In fact, McKenna looked the same as the rest of Jack’s patrons. Dirty fingernails. A smudge of soot on his chin. Soiled white shirt. Baggy woolen trousers. Battered leather boots. Average height, with a slight but wiry frame. Maybe twenty-eight years old. Round spectacles framing clear, hazel eyes. Untidy ginger hair spilling down around an unruly handlebar mustache. Under one arm he clutched a copy of The Mine Journal, proving McKenna could read or at least wanted people to think he could. 

McKenna set down a stack of coins on the bar, from which he allowed Jack to deduct payment for his whiskey without making any calculations of the change, as if he had no fear of being cheated. He listened. He smiled. He drank off one whiskey and tapped a thick finger on Jack’s bar for another. Those hazel eyes drank in the smoke-darkened beams, the stone fireplace big enough for a man to stand within, the portraits of Irish revolutionaries Wolfe Tone and Daniel O’Connell pegged to the wall.

In Jack’s experience, courting a man wasn’t much different from courting a woman, but men were easier marks. McKenna’s first move was toward Jack’s brother Eddie, a meatier, rounder, upended version of Jack with a tousled shock of ginger hair lightly threaded with gray and watery blue eyes covered by lenses hashed with what looked like scratches. After a minute or two of animated conversation, Eddie shouted for quiet so McKenna could sing.

In an indisputably Irish tenor, the snitch belted out:

When the wind blows wild at night

in the breaker's melancholy.

If you stand in the dark, with your ear to the wind,

you can hear the Sons of Molly.

Down in the dark of the old mine shaft

you can smell the smoke and the fire.

And the whispers low in the mines below

are the ghost of Molly Maguire. 

At the ballad’s end, the miners murmured approval and returned to their conversations, but Eddie—who drank more than a man who was paying his own bar tab--positively bubbled over with childish glee. He knew every miner’s song by heart, he said, but McKenna’s was new to him. He planned to sing it in the mine as soon as he learned the words, which he begged McKenna to teach him.

Eddie turned to Jack and asked, “Doesn’t the man have a fine, rich pair of lungs on him, Jackie?”

Jack stared at the snitch and made no answer.

McKenna humbly insisted that his singing voice was but a sour note on a cracked fiddle.

“But,” McKenna cried, “I can tell from the way you talk that you’ve got a tremendous, thunderous voice, Eddie. Give us a song, would you please?” The snitch evidently knew a precious secret: the best way to bind a man to you was to ask him a favor, not to do him one. 

Loving any excuse to sing, Eddie nodded toward Charles McAllister, whose nickname was Yellow Boy on account of his blond hair and golden skin. Yellow Boy piped. Eddie sang. McKenna danced a little jig. Jack polished a glass in time to the tune until it seemed its sides became as thin and fragile as the sheen of frost on that morning’s puddles. 

He was never wrong. No. Never. From his mother’s side of the family, he’d inherited a special and uncanny gift for certainty. With one glance, Jack could take the measure of a man and know his character and intentions better than and before the man himself.

As Yellow Boy piped the last note, Owen Gillespie, the ancient dean of the miners, belched and blamed the white onion in his potatoes. Yellow Boy farted and blamed Gillespie. Thick pipe and lantern smoke divided the cramped tavern into multiple warrens and cubbies, each crowded with men vying for attention now that Eddie had wrung the last line from the ballad until it bled. The comforting stench of unwashed underarms, unchanged clothes, and damp wool filled the air. Seven-foot ceilings crowned untrue walls fixed with off-kilter windows above sloping floors, all of which gave Hibernian House a pleasantly deranged quality that contributed to its rowdy, familiar, giddy-goat atmosphere.

Jack scanned Hibernian House for possible accomplices. To Jack’s relief, every face except McKenna’s belonged to a breaker boy, Irish-born hard rockers Jack had known more than half his life with whom Jack had labored in the collieries long before any of them had sprouted a pubic hair. Caps on their heads, suspenders over long sleeve shirts that soon turned a dark gray, face and hands filthy, lanterns hot-stoked so they could see clearly, the breaker boys had sat astride the coal chute and picked slate and other debris from the chunks of anthracite until their hands were scarred and bloody and their fingernails worn to nothing. As the coal tipple roared when rail cars were filled, the boys had fantasized about escaping to the west, where they heard men like themselves were making fortunes mining silver, while the mine overseer bellowed threats to replace them with a mechanical slate picker if they failed to work faster.

Now, two decades later, still in the same town where they’d first picked coal, the breaker boys cheerfully questioned each other’s manhood, raised doubt as to the purity of another man’s mother or wife, or expressed pity at a brother’s want of strength or brains or both. Jimmy Breslin recalled the time Powder Keg Kerrigan’s wife had mistaken the hind end of a mule for her husband and served the beast Powder Keg’s supper. Owen Gillespie plopped five darts into precisely the same hole on the board. Conversations, boasts and jibes buffeted Jack’s ears, so that the noise and smoke alone were enough to hold up the roof and walls if ever the beams collapsed. Even James O’Donnell, Jack’s brother-in-law who’d lost both legs beneath the knee in a mining accident, had balanced himself on a stool and was holding forth as if he’d never known affliction.

Yellow Boy blew his left nostril out on the floor and raised sly questions about the length of Muff Lawler’s manhood, which he pretended to compare unfavorably against his tin whistle, which in his meaty hands seemed hardly larger than a rolled cigarette. The harder Muff tried to silence the speculations and taunts of his fellow breaker boys, the more glee the Yellow Boy derived and the more other breaker boys stopped to listen and join in the fun, until Muff stormed off for the whorehouse, where, he said, at least he’d be able to get the subject of these speculations properly measured, thank you very much.

The snitch let Eddie buy a round and then reciprocated. He bought and accepted further drinks from others with practiced grace, but his eyes didn’t get drunk with the rest of him. Indeed, Jack thought they weren’t eyes at all. They were screens behind which lurked another man, another pair of eyes, biding time, measuring, calculating, every glance like a click of beads on an abacus.

“And one for yourself, governor,” McKenna carelessly added at the end of an order, favoring Jack with a quick friendly glance.

Jack pretended he hadn’t heard. 

McKenna pretended he hadn’t noticed being ignored. His gestures were easy and unguarded. He spontaneously threw his arm around Eddie, touched and elbowed him, and once held his face between his palms when he wanted to be certain he was heard. 

No doubt, targeting Eddie wasn’t pure chance. Eddie was well known as a light touch in matters of credit. If Jack let him behind the bar, he’d give away whiskey like water. Compulsively good humored and innocent, Eddie never spoke an uncivil word about anybody in the world. Easily spooked by loud sounds, sudden appearances, or extinguishing lights, all of which were common in the mines, he was nevertheless neither a fearful soul nor an incompetent miner. He had the natural confidence of a man of good will, who expected all others to be like him.

Eddie was Jack’s weak spot, a convenient steppingstone to Jack himself. The Coal Kings who operated the mines would be only too happy to bring Jack down. He was an upstart. A political boss. A friend of Pennsylvania’s governor. And because he didn’t work in the mines, the Coal Kings had no control over him.

McKenna regaled Eddie with another story. Obviously smitten, Eddie stared rapt at the stranger, who had a gift for gab surpassing Eddie’s own.

What an outrage that a snitch would dare use a member of Jack’s own family under the roof of his own establishment to reach him! The Coal Kings evidently considered Jack to be either singularly stupid or singularly weak.

Something broke loose in Jack. He was a boy again in Ireland submitting to his father’s blackening his pale cheeks with a lump of coal while his mother fretted. He was standing in the sharp darkness holding a bloody knife while hamstrung cattle screamed and men set torches to thatch of the cottages of scum who’d turned against their own kind. 

Jack barked, “What’d you say your name was, fella?” 

Silence fell over Hibernian House. Not quite understanding the situation, but game for whatever came in defense of a fellow breaker boy, Kerrigan, Lawler, Breslin, the McAllister brothers, and Alexander Campbell excused themselves from their conversations and sidled closer. Yellow Boy kept yapping even as he cracked his knuckles in anticipation of a fight.  In the mines, every man relied on every other man for his survival, and the breaker boys knew how to punish those who struck out on their own or crossed one of their kind.

Eddie blustered, “See here, Jack, that’s no way ...” 

The snitch touched Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie, who hated conflict, shut his hole.

Advancing his chin into the lantern light, McKenna leaned slightly over the bar. He was like a man offering a pick from a hand of cards but trying to make a particular three of spades most prominent in hopes it would be selected first. 

“I didn’t,” he growled. 

Yellow Boy piped a sour note.

Rising from his bar stool, McKenna seemed to grow like a beanstalk in a child’s fairy tale. The shadow he threw against the wall was bigger than he was, and Jack swore a second shadow, thrown by a lantern more distant, shadowed the first, as if McKenna was a mere puppet, and behind the scenes was another pulling the strings and stirring up trouble.

Breaker boys who didn’t want to risk wasting whiskey in a fight downed their glasses. Jack felt beneath the bar for his ashwood walking stick. 

McKenna’s hand shot out toward him. It was all Jack could do not to flinch, as if McKenna had stabbed at him with a long knife. 

“McKenna. Patrick McKenna. Pleased to meet you.”

Jack considered refusing the offered hand and beating the snitch over the head with his walking stick. He considered piercing McKenna’s throat with a fork and dumping his corpse in Mahanoy Creek. 

No Irishman in Hibernian House would ever testify against him. Indeed, to a man, they’d have given Jack a solid alibi. They’d deny McKenna was ever in the Hibernian House, or in Girardville at all, or they’d say he’d departed an hour ago and in good health. They’d cross themselves and call McKenna a poor wretch and hope all was right between him and the Almighty. And if the alibis didn’t work, Jack was confident he could secure a pardon from his friend, Pennsylvania’s governor, John Hartranft.

Inside the seconds, additional seconds yawned. Jack’s eyes were riveted on the extended hand, on which orange hair flourished. His continuing certainty that McKenna was a snitch was like the quivering of an arrow striking its target, a stiffening like an iron rod swung swiftly against a bare kneecap.

You sure? Eddie’s hooded eyes asked.

Take it, a voice hissed in Jack’s head.

Beyond a reasonable doubt, Jack thought. Or any doubt, really. Which was normally enough for the breaker boys. They didn’t need to be told twice. But somehow, this time, Jack had failed to share his conviction that McKenna was bad news.

Jack’s every instinct screamed. An owl cried in his throat. The rafters seemed to fill with mocking laughter.

Later, Jack thought. I’ll take of this later. In private.

Jack dried his right hand on the bar rag and entrusted it to the stranger’s grip. 

Eddie shouted “Hurrah” and “Slainte.” Bright white teeth flashed in the breaker boys’ dark faces, which were never completely clear of coal dust. Looking a little disappointed by the outbreak of peace, Yellow Boy resumed his rollicking pipe. Men called for refills.

For a brief second, the snitch’s eye cleared, yielding Jack a clean glimpse of the man’s soul. McKenna had lifted the veil for Jack alone, which inexplicably--and to Jack’s disgust--made Jack feel grateful for the unwanted intimacy. McKenna retained Jack’s hand as if he had captured it in battle.

Drained of his spunk and joy as if he’d just spent himself in a sheet rather than in his wife, Jack said, “I’m Jack Kehoe. They call me Black Jack.”

McKenna grinned yet more fiercely and again pumped Jack’s hand. His slashing eyes were two torches on a boreen under a moonless Irish night.

Still grinning with a mix of menace and delight, the snitch said, “Yes. I know.”