Tim McGregor - Killing Down the Roman Line

“Son of a bitch.”

Two schoolgirls near the window looked up when he cursed and Jim fought the urge to sprint for the exit. An old woman shushed him.

“Can I help you?”

Jim turned to find the librarian standing behind him. Not what he expected either. A redheaded woman who looked to be half his age with a heavy stack of hardcovers cradled in her freckled arms. “No,” he blurted out on instinct. “Just browsing.”

“Okay. If you could keep the cursing to a quiet blasphemy, that’d be great.” She smiled and turned to go.

“Wait. Uh… where’s the local history?”

Three aisles over, near the kid’s reading tables, on a shelf with the genealogy books. The young librarian’s name was Siobhan Murphy, second daughter to the Murphy’s over on Bleeker Street. She asked what he was looking for and pulled a handful of books. She flipped through the indices, helping Jim narrow his search. Siobhan smiled a lot and even laughed at the jokes he made about his ignorance. She tilted her head and giggled and for a brief moment, Jim wondered if she was flirting with him but chased the thought away.

The sound of books crashing in a nearby stack interrupted them and Siobhan excused herself. Jim settled into a table and flipped through the yellowing books, their spines cracking from disuse. A History of Pennyluck and its People, Middlesex County Memories . The typeset was dense and the pages smelled of mildew. No volume newer than the late seventies and Jim groaned over the prospect of reading through it. The florescent lighting and the constant shushing of the old woman in the next aisle was tortuous.

Siobhan helped him fill out the form for a library card and a few whispered jokes later, Jim acquired his first library card in twenty years. Again he had the odd feeling the girl was overly friendly but dismissed the thought. She’s half your age, you old fool . Still, it made him smile.

Three minutes later he was down the pub.

Puddycombe slid a fresh pint over to old man Gallagher but kept his eye on the new girl trying to pull her third Guiness in a row. The head flowed leaving barely an inch of black in the bottom of the glass. How much spillage did this girl think he’d allow? He’d shown Audrey how to pour the damn thing three times already and she still couldn’t do it. He shooed the girl off, notched a fresh glass under the tap and then set the pint onto the bar for the girl to watch it settle into a clean line of black and tan. “See?”

Audrey rolled her eyes and pouted off for a smoke break. Puddycombe deplored for the future if it was to be left in the hands of this younger generation. Mollycoddled and overbearing in a grotesque sense of their own self-importance. The whole world was being delivered to hell in a handbasket and all this generation could do was diddle their funny little phones.

Someone at the far end of the bar hollered for service, waving an empty pitcher over their heads. Berryhill was in the back of the bar, clacking poolballs while Combat Kyle waved the dead pitcher at the barkeep. Bill pocketed three stripes and then scratched. Draining his glass, he spotted something a few tables down and elbowed Kyle.

“What kinda faggot comes to the pub to read?”

The history of Pennyluck began with fire. A crude wickiup of greenwood and mortar joints at the southern bend of the Red Creek. A crew of topographers and land survey agents from the Canada Company, looking to build an outpost for the flow of timber down the river and on to Lake Huron. The site was already occupied, a seasonal encampment of Cree who spent the spring here before moving further north at high summer.

The Cree took issue with the encampment, wary of the company men who were endlessly marching onto their lands and claiming it belonged to the crown. As a courtesy, the elders sent an envoy to inform the survey crew that they could not build here, asking them to push on further down the river. The envoy was clubbed about the head and sent home bleeding.

When no further Cree envoys appeared, the survey men assumed the Indians had ceded the point and moved on. The Cree, however, did not move on. They watched from a distance as the white men felled green trees and built their log hut. Four days later, with the structure completed and the company men working further down the river, three Cree warriors crept in, silent as ghosts, and burned the outpost to the ground.

The survey men left, withdrawing back upriver towards Fort August. The Cree scavenged the site for anything left behind but the whites had left nothing of worth in their retreat. The calm was short-lived as the company returned four weeks later with a retinue of soldiers intent on killing any Indian they saw, forcing the Cree off the land for good. Still, the company’s victory was also culled short as the surveyors concluded that the bend in the river was too hazardous for their needs and they decamped and moved back up the river where they found a better site, displacing an encampment of Dutch settlers who had settled there.

The disputed land remained unpopulated by settlers and Cree alike for two decades until a surveyor named Bill Hodgkins found it. Seeing the potential for a mill on the river, Hodgkins leased the land from the Canada Company at a rate of a penny per acre. He built his mill and cleared a road to Fort August just as the first waves of Irish émigrés spilled from the coffin ships in Montreal and New Brunswick, the sick along with the dead. Hodgkins sent notice to his fellow Irishmen in the port cities to come settle his green slice, where he claimed every man with a strong back could own forty acres. Even the lame and the infirm could carve out five acres, the soil so sweet it begged to be tilled.

And so they came, the starved and bedraggled fugitives who had never owned land, whose fathers and forefathers were no more than hewers of wood and drawers of water for the landlord’s man. Hodgkins set the men to clearing the land, promising an acre of woodland for every acre cleared in town. Hodgkins was true to his word but poor in his accounting, granting the same piece of land to more than one settler and confusing the deeds between others. That was what instigated the feuding, the ownership of land. The wiser of the settlers moved onto their land and refused to budge or even submit to arbitration. Some were chased off by their rival claimants, beaten or burned out. The hardier families fought back and felled the trees. Seeing the disarray, some simply squatted on a tract of Hodgkins’ own land and refused to move. Hodgkins’ dream of a peaceful ‘Eire for all’ fell apart in drunken brawls in the mud street and bitter tit-for-tat revenge and counter-revenge. Big Bill retreated behind the walls of his log house and relented to the devils in the bottle and in the spring of 1849 was found dead on the creekbank with his brains dashed on the rocks.

These inauspicious beginnings fixed the disposition of the little township for the rest of the century. The feuding and the lawlessness ran amuck in the streets. Like some Wild West outpost in the fabled tales of the republic to the south, the good people of Pennyluck pummelled each other senseless in the taverns and burnt one another’s barns to the ground and shot their rival’s horses or sawed the axes of their enemy’s wagons so the whole trap collapsed on the drunken trot home.

Out of this hard-knuckled chaos came the Corrigans. Refugees lately of Tipperary, like most of the town, fleeing hardships and bad deeds. The patriarch, James Corrigan, killed a man named Patrick Cryder at a logging bee in 1884 and was sent to Kingston gaol house to await hanging under the laws of her majesty the Queen. His wife, Mary Corrigan, was left alone to raise their six children and manage the farm. When the children were taunted for having a jailbird father, Mary taught her brood to fight back and show no mercy. In the evenings, Mary wrote petitions to the courts begging clemency for her husband, father to a wayward brood in need. In 1891, James Corrigan’s date with the hangman was overturned and he returned home to a family of hard fists and grim mouths, his boys now grown into vicious young men who were quick to brawl and merciless in their fury. So feared was the clan that other families banded together in an alliance to protect themselves from the hated Corrigans. The formation of the Vigilance Peace Society was announced in church, with the blessing of Father John Donnelly, and was declared publically to keep the peace in the streets but in truth, the society was little more than a war party to fight back against the Corrigan terror.