Chapter Twenty-Three
Joseph was about a breath away from consigning all of Hope Springs to perdition and letting them happily take themselves there. Though the ranch owners out at the farthest reaches of both the roads were a rough and often argumentative group, he’d reached the point where he far preferred their company to any of his nearer neighbors.
Almost every day that week he’d had a new report of one side or the other causing problems. Eggs had been stolen. Animals were being let out at night, leading to creative methods of locking barns or rigging pans to the doors so they would clang about should anyone try to break in. Hay had disappeared. Equipment had as well.
Bob Archibald and Damion MacCormack had spent much of an afternoon a few days earlier fighting on the road to town. Chester Smith and Eoin O’Donaghue undertook the same task, but along the banks of the river. No one was quite certain where Gerald Jones and Seamus Kelly had held their boxing match, but they looked every bit as bad as the others.
They were stealing from each other, pounding one another into a pulp, and generally doing their utmost to make life for their neighbors as miserable as possible. Their animosity increased day by day. The likelihood of widespread violence continued to grow. At some point, Joseph realized with frustrated resignation, he would have to once again threaten them into a cease-fire.
He’d seldom felt less like going to church than he did that Sunday morning. In the past, the Sunday after the final harvest had been a favorite. His mind was clear of work for once. But that day going to church felt like another chore.
“Are you ready to go, girls?” he asked, stepping into the parlor as he straightened his lapels.
Mrs. Smith finished tying a white ribbon on one of Emma’s long braids. The woman gave him a single quick nod, a gesture he’d come to recognize as her most common. It meant everything from agreement to reprimand to acknowledgment of an assignment. She didn’t say much. What she did say tended to be a touch too blunt. He almost preferred her silence.
“Come along.” He motioned the girls toward the dining room.
They passed through it to the kitchen and out the back door. Mrs. Smith followed along in their wake. He helped the girls onto the back bench of the buggy. Mrs. Smith preferred to sit up front. That had taken some getting used to, as the girls had grown accustomed to sitting beside him. Still, it kept the peace, which was all he wanted.
The drive to church was a quiet one. Ivy didn’t chatter away, and Emma’s usual silence felt quieter somehow. Had the tension in Hope Springs settled on his girls as well?
Inside the church building the townspeople sat like statues. Backs were ramrod straight. Eyes remained firmly ahead. Both sides refused to acknowledge the other. Though Joseph could see nothing but the backs of their heads from his place in the rear of the room, their postures were unmistakable. Anger and distrust and pride rippled through the entire congregation. Even his own girls looked somber and withdrawn.
Joseph slumped a little on the bench, tired to his core. If everyone would simply try to get along, life would be far easier for all of them. He was sick of the whole town at that moment.
Every one of them except Katie. He’d taken the girls to visit her again the night before. The feud had come up in conversation. Though he hadn’t said anything, Katie seemed to understand he didn’t want to talk about it. She quickly changed the topic—he didn’t even remember what to—and they spent the rest of the night on light subjects. She played her violin. The girls danced. Ivy even sang a song Katie had taught her. He’d had to force himself to leave without begging her to come home with them.
He’d gone home alone, put the girls to bed alone.
“Stop fidgeting, children.” Mrs. Smith spoke without even looking at the girls. Her eyes remained properly straight ahead where Reverend Ford was seated near the pulpit reading in his Bible.
Joseph didn’t think the girls were moving all that much. A shift in weight now and then, but considering their ages, that was admirable. They stilled their small movements and sat very properly on the bench.
Reverend Ford rose to begin the service. If he noticed the undercurrents of battle in the air, he didn’t let on. His words of welcome didn’t differ in the slightest from the ones he usually spoke. The congregation muttered the morning hymn more than sang it.
The preacher got no further than “The topic of today’s sermon is taken from—” before he was interrupted.
Bob Archibald—Joseph would recognize his acerbic tones anywhere—called out, “You should preach about not stealing another man’s animals.”
Reverend Ford’s face froze, his eyes darting about as if searching for an explanation for the interruption.
“Only if you Reds’ll listen,” someone on the Irish side called back.
Are they planning to fight inside the church now?
“This is hardly the place,” Reverend Ford insisted.
Bob Archibald was on his feet. “The church is just the place to tell these heathens they can’t get away with wringing my rooster’s neck.”
One of Archibald’s animals was killed? Joseph hadn’t heard that.
“I know it was one of you.” Archibald pointed a finger at the other side of the room. “I found the poor animal dead at the door of my barn this morning.” He glared at the Irish. “Don’t think this won’t go unanswered.”
Damion MacCormack jumped to his feet. “Then maybe you’d care to answer for my calf. ’Twas let out of the barn the week of the harvest run, and we’ve not found it yet. That needs answering.”
Shouts became general. Accusations flew across the room like cannon shot. Men had each other by the collars, shaking and shouting. The women yelled and pointed and glared. Even their children joined in the growing anarchy.
Joseph glanced at his little ones. Ivy clasped her hands over her ears, a look of misery on her face. Emma’s chin began to quiver, her eyes wide with fear. This was the utopia he’d left Baltimore for, the peaceful, happy place he’d wanted to raise his children, the community Katie had given up her dreams of Ireland to be part of?
Little Marianne Johnson rushed down the aisle to the centered back bench where Joseph and his family sat. The pleading in her expression was clear. She wished to escape the shouting and anger. Joseph nodded, and she climbed up on the bench next to Emma. The two girls held each other’s hands, watching the battle playing out in front of them with growing worry and anguish.
Perhaps Katie was the wisest of all of them, choosing not to attend services. She’d denounced the entire thing as hypocritical her very first week in town.
These were good people when they weren’t fighting. If they’d just calm down, let their tempers cool, this difficulty might pass and quit frightening their own children.
Someone—Joseph couldn’t see exactly who through all the chaos—shoved someone else, and he knew the time for sitting back had passed.
He set two fingers in his mouth and blew. An ear-splitting, shrill whistle ricocheted mercilessly around the room. All eyes turned toward him. He slowly rose, looking them in the eye one by one. He walked with deliberate steps up the center aisle. The crowd of combatants parted, most dropping their gaze the moment he captured it. Perhaps they could still be convinced to step back—not reasoned with, necessarily, but momentarily appeased.
He nodded to Reverend Ford when he reached the spot just in front of the pulpit. The slightest nod of the reverend’s head seemed to indicate permission to usurp command of the service for a moment.
“Sit down.” Joseph addressed the group in a voice that was not so much calm as it was thick with vexation. They obeyed, though many did so reluctantly. “Is this what you’ve come to? Brawling in a church? Dragging your little children into your own blinding hatred?”
A few people had the decency to look shamefaced.
“I have never made myself an enemy to any of you, never taken sides.” He locked eyes with anyone willing to keep their gaze off the floor. “All of you know how I feel about your determination to destroy each other. If you keep things relatively peaceful, I stay out of it. But we’ve seen fistfights at school, on the road. We almost had one here a moment ago. Animals are being stolen, let loose and killed. This stops now.” He emphasized each word of his final sentence.
For a moment he simply stared them all down. They needed to see his disgust with the situation, his determination to end it.
“Prices were low at market, and many of you on both sides of this feud came to me asking for time, for consideration, for mercy in your land payments. I didn’t call in those debts, though the terms of your notes allow me to.” More eyes dropped. More faces fell in humility. “But if you aren’t willing to give each other consideration and mercy, then neither am I.”
Suddenly he had the full attention of every adult in the room. Most of these families—nearly all of them, in fact—hadn’t been in a position to make a full payment on their land. If he called in their notes, they would be forced from their homes.
Please don’t let it come to that.
“So long as you keep the peace between each other, nothing will change. But start this up again, start brawling and stealing from and destroying each other, and I will call in every single debt owed to me in this town.”
He hated that the only way to get through to his neighbors was to make them fear him. He wanted friends, associates with whom he could laugh and spend an evening of amiable conversation. Instead, he’d forced himself into isolation by the necessity of his threats.
“I don’t want to have to do this,” he assured them.
Thomas Dempsey called back, “We don’t want you to have to either, Joseph Archer.”
He could smile the tiniest bit at that. Leave it to one of the O’Connors, even an in-law, to break some of the tension.
“So keep quiet and peaceable,” Joseph said. “And let the reverend deliver his sermon without interruption.”
As he walked back to his seat in silence, his eyes caught Emma’s. She looked at him as if she hardly knew him, as if he frightened her.
They’ve turned my own child against me.
He hadn’t the heart to sit beside her and feel that condemnation. Rather than take his seat, he instead slipped out the back door. He leaned against the outside wall of the church building and closed his eyes. Would Emma look at him differently now? Would Ivy?
Would Katie? If anyone would understand, she would. He found some comfort in the belief that she wouldn’t condemn him outright.
Acting the part of the coldhearted man of business had cost him some associates over the years and come in the way of friendships. If it cost him Katie, he didn’t think he could bear it.