Himself: Read online

  Published by Buffalo Heritage Press

  Copyright © 2014 by William J. Donohue

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher.

  Buffalo Heritage Press

  266 Elmwood Avenue, Ste. 407

  Buffalo, New York 14222

  716-903-7155

  [email protected]

  www.BuffaloHeritage.com

  ISBN 978-1-942483-09-0 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-1-942483-10-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-942483-11-3 (ebook)

  Cover art and book design by Goulah Design Group

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgments

  Family and friends helped me to write this book: Sue Donohue, wife and reader; Gene Donohue, cousin, consultant, resource, and founding 155th Regiment re-enactor; Jack Brew, cousin and lifeline to the main character; the late Mary Suchan, John’s great-granddaughter; Elaine Kelly Pease, great-granddaughter of Captain Tim Kelly of the 164th Regiment; Patty McClain, proofreader and literary critic; Pat Wille, formatter and technical adviser; Jeanne Bowman, reader and literary critic; Bob Yott, Bath Soldiers and Sailors Home historian; Kathy Shaw, literary critic; Buffalo Irish Genealogical Society members; librarians at both the Buffalo and Erie County Central Library and the Clarence Library; Ben Maryniak, late Civil War historian; First Ward historians Barbara Sullivan and Tim Bohen; Ed and Sue Curtis, Salisbury Confederate Prison Association founders ; Michael Gent, reader and literary adviser; Judy Tamburlin, clerical help and reader; Tim Trabold, computer consultant and manuscript rescuer; Dr. Edmund Egan, medical adviser; and the volunteer staff at the Waterfront Memories Museum.

  Lastly, let me mention in a most special way my editor, Carl Thiel.

  Preface

  This story is historical fiction. It reconstructs the lives of Patrick and John Donohue, my great grandfather and great-uncle respectively, using historical information and family memory. What they said and what they did precisely I invented to bring these people and their issues to life.

  Patrick returned home from America’s worst war with only a shadow of his manhood intact. John had great difficulty tolerating heavy manual labor throughout a sixty-six hour workweek. The historical Patrick lived in twenty or more residences, a sign of his personal and financial instability, in some measure due to his alcoholism. He died in the Bath Soldiers Home, a residence for indigent war veterans. The Patrick of the book becomes a mature and contributing member of society. He is a composite of generations of struggling Donohue men and my hopes for myself.

  The main female characters, Maire, Annabelle, Mary, and Millicent, are largely or entirely fictional. They are my way of saying their women are the major exogenous reason Donohue men have grown to greater selfhood.

  Contents

  Preface

  SECTION I The Early Buffalo Years

  Chapter 1 Gram to the Rescue

  Chapter 2 Hard Times

  Chapter 3 Life in the Ward

  Chapter 4 Sex Education and Shoveling Coal

  Chapter 5 Pat Goes to Work

  SECTION II The Civil War

  Chapter 6 Off to War

  Chapter 7 Fortress Suffolk

  Chapter 8 The Siege of Suffolk

  Chapter 9 Sangster’s Station

  Chapter 10 Spotsylvania Courthouse

  Chapter 11 Cold Harbor

  Chapter 12 Petersburg

  Chapter 13 Reams Station

  Chapter 14 Prison Life

  Chapter 15 First Hatcher’s Run

  Chapter 16 Escape

  Chapter 17 The Final Battles

  Chapter 18 Pat Comes Home

  Chapter 19 John Comes Home

  SECTION III The Fenian Raid and Marriage

  Chapter 20 The Fenians Invade Canada

  Chapter 21 Mary Nagle

  Chapter 22 Worker and Father

  Chapter 23 Garrett to the Rescue

  SECTION IV Descent into the Abyss

  Chapter 24 Increasing Instability

  Chapter 25 Deep Shadows

  Chapter 26 Bath Soldiers Home

  Chapter 27 Finding His Place

  SECTION V Redemption

  Chapter 28 Millicent

  Chapter 29 Breakdown

  Chapter 30 Rock Bottom

  Chapter 31 The Storyteller

  Glossary

  Section I

  The Early Buffalo Years

  Chapter 1

  Gram to the Rescue

  In the winter of 1850, Maire received Margaret’s letter expecting news of her grandsons—the children of her only child, Catherine—and progress she hoped they would be making by now. She had a neighbor read it to her, for she read neither Irish Gaelic, her native tongue, nor English. The neighbor read key sentences twice to make sure Maire understood what they meant. At the end of the second paragraph describing the boys’ behavior, Maire cried out in anguish, “Read no more. I know what I must do.”

  Maire Elizabeth Joy had emigrated from Mallow, County Cork, Ireland, to the tiny community of Niagara in Southern Ontario in 1842 with Catherine and Catherine’s husband, Patrick Donohue. They lived for two years in Canada before moving south and east to Rochester, New York. Maire moved on to Buffalo. She maintained her ties with her Rochester relatives, including Conal, Patrick’s brother, and his wife, Margaret, who together had first finessed the whole move from Ireland and Canada.

  Maire had been widowed after Catherine’s birth and supported herself and her infant by sewing and doing fine needlework for wealthy Anglo-Irish women. She had every confidence she could do the same in America. She had also been a public figure in Mallow, where she functioned as a spree or festival organizer, a seanachai or public storyteller, and a healer. She pictured herself doing the same in any Irish community anywhere in the world.

  She soon found a market for her old trade in Buffalo. Maire visited Rochester once a year when Patrick or Conal sent her the fare, as they usually did. Over the years in Ireland, and now in America, she became a legendary figure in their eyes. Above all, she was a delight to be with. Catherine and Patrick welcomed her charismatic presence whenever they could persuade her to come. Patrick often commented to his wife after Maire’s visit, “She leaves a gift of peace and joy. We must treasure it. We’ll never know the like.”

  Two weeks after receiving the letter, Maire appeared at Conal and Margaret’s door. At fifty-eight, “Mother Joy,” as she was known within the family, was still vigorous. Barely five-foot two, with broad shoulders, muscular arms, and thick waist, she wore her heavy, long grey hair in a bun.

  Her bright blue eyes and broad smile conveyed to the anxious Margaret, “Don’t worry. I can handle my grandsons.” Laughing loudly and punctuating her remarks with stories from Buffalo and Ireland, she spent the evening chitchatting with Conal and Margaret about the boys, while Margaret threw their few clothes into a flour sack.

  Margaret and Conal had gladly taken in the boys, John and Patrick, Jr., ages six and five, as they had promised their mother a few days before her death. Catherine, age twenty-eight, and Patrick Sr., age twenty-nine, had both fallen victim to the cholera epidemic that swept Rochester in 1849.

  Conal and Margar
et, both thirty-five and childless, were strongly committed to making a home for the boys and raising them as their own sons. Conal moved bunk beds from his brother’s home a few blocks away and stacked them one above the other in the nine-by-ten-foot bedroom meant for the children who had never come.

  Maire was very proud of the way her relatives had helped with the move from Ireland. Conal had come first, married Margaret a year later, and urged Patrick to follow. In 1844, Conal and Margaret had settled Patrick and Catherine in a small but comfortable cottage nearby, just north of downtown in the Genesee River waterfalls area of Rochester known as Little Dublin.

  In Buffalo, Maire lived with her brother, Jack, a widower. He had asked for her help raising his daughter, Johanna, who had turned seven in 1845. The whole family appealed to Maire whenever they felt a pressing need that she could best fulfill. Having lived the first two years of her marriage in her mother’s home, Maire was also keenly aware that living in the same house with a married daughter often bred conflict.

  Conal found Patrick work as a cooper in the same flour mill where he himself was employed for three years. A year later, Conal helped Patrick build a cooperage business in small villages throughout the area. Weekends the four—Conal and Margaret, Patrick and Catherine—socialized together in pubs and at church events. They became best friends.

  The year 1849 was a trial for Maire, who joined Conal and Margaret in nursing first Patrick, then Catherine. In one year, these strong, young individuals, one after the other, descended into helplessness and, finally, painful and miserable deaths. Throughout the ordeals, Conal, Margaret, and Maire could do little but wipe brows and butts and pray. The fact that Maire stood by them through it all like a rock, most notably through the death of her daughter, and did so with equanimity, wisdom, and a deep spirituality bordering on the mystical, only endeared her more to her Rochester family and built her legend to the point of canonized sainthood. In their eyes no pope could have raised her any higher. The way she handled her only daughter’s death was a model of parent-child relationship. They could see she grieved Catherine’s death deeply but remained strong for the sake of those around her.

  Conal found Patrick’s illness especially difficult, Patrick being a giant of a man at six feet two inches, with the arm span and strength to carry two loaded barrels from the mill floor down three flights of stairs to a waiting wagon. Conal, who was only five feet eight inches and of modest frame, regaled family and friends on Saturdays in Little Dublin pubs with stories of Patrick’s progress in building his cooperage business and his feats of strength at the mill. Patrick, in turn, soaked up his brother’s loyalty and cherished him for his goodness.

  After supporting Catherine throughout Patrick’s illness and death, her demise caught Margaret and Maire by surprise, despite the fact that hundreds were dying of the plague throughout Little Dublin, which was crowded, swampy, and overflowing with human and animal sewage. Those who nursed others often succumbed themselves to the terrible plague.

  When it came time to bring John and Patrick Jr. into their home, Conal and Margaret were emotionally spent and unable to cope with the anger and turmoil that possessed the two boys.

  In January 1850, Margaret, in desperation and with some guilt, wrote Maire sixty miles away in Buffalo. “Things are not working out. John and Pat simply will not obey or listen to anything we ask them to do. Nearly every day they run away and float through downtown Rochester begging.”

  After helping Margaret pack the boys’ clothes, Maire sat in a favorite rocking chair before a blazing fireplace, her two grandsons seated on a rug and leaning into her knees. The boys cringed as Conal and Margaret told of their misdeeds and hung on their grandmother’s every word. Maire’s replies in the form of short stories appeared to be connected to what the adults in the room were saying, but actually, she tailored them to what she knew the boys would enjoy. Margaret and Conal smiled knowingly at her ploy.

  When Margaret announced it was time for bed, the children begged to stay up. “Could Gram tell us just one story of Half Night O’Toole?” asked John.

  “We’ll have plenty of time tomorrow,” she told her young audience.

  After the children went to bed, Conal and Margaret told Maire a tale of the boys’ antics far more graphic than those recounted earlier.

  “The boys lived three days aboard a steamship in Rochester harbor with Russian sailors,” Conal said. “Don’t ye know, Mother Joy, we had police, pastor, and friends searching the city in vain. When Father Edwards was after finding them, he told the boys he was going to take them to his orphanage for bad boys.”

  “We were ready to let the Father have the two of them,” added Margaret.

  With each new saga they told, Maire’s eyes widened and she exclaimed, “O, Glory be to God.” She was convinced now that she had made the right decision. Difficult as times were for her, she knew she was the only one who could handle her grandsons. She had no idea how she would support the boys on the few dollars she was earning with her sewing, but she believed that God never gave a cross without also giving the grace to bear it.

  The next morning, Friday, February 1, 1850, dawned clear and cold. A light covering of snow off Lake Ontario crunched beneath their feet as Maire and the boys hugged Margaret and mounted Conal’s open carriage to begin the daylong trip to Buffalo. On board were the flour sack with the boys’ clothes, Maire’s small cloth bag of garments and personal items, and a basket of food that Margaret had prepared. Maire and the boys waved to Margaret as Conal clucked at his horse to move out.

  Once underway, the boys clung to their grandmother. Roads rutted from a recent thaw and freeze threw the car from side to side. They hardly noticed how cleverly their uncle wove past wagons bringing grain to feed stores and beer to saloons, nor the smell of horse urine, especially acrid on a cold morning, nor the hogs boldly roaming the streets rooting for garbage.

  After a ten-minute trip into downtown Rochester, Maire urged John and Pat to apologize to their uncle for the way they had been acting and to give him a big hug and kiss. They obeyed, then the three boarded a Tonawanda Railway train for Batavia, thirty miles west.

  The trip to Batavia was the boys’ first train ride and they took it with a mix of fear, excitement, and curiosity. After a spate of exclamations and questions, they settled down and began to open up to their grandmother, whom they trusted and loved almost as much as they had their dad and mom.

  “And it was all so sudden,” John said. “One moment Mom and Dad were home with us. The next they were gone. There’s a hole in my heart and somethin’ big is missin’ inside a me.” He lapsed into silence.

  Maire leaned forward and patted the boy’s knee. “I miss your parents almost as much as you do. I remember the terrible times in Rochester, what with hearses crawlin’ over the streets every day by the dozens. I only saw the likes in Ireland, boys.”

  Pat spoke up. “Gram, before you came we were mad and acting crazy. We fought with our friends over anything and ran away when our aunt and uncle went to bed.”

  Maire gave the boys all the time they needed to express their feelings. She was no stranger to loss of parents. Hers had died when she was a young girl and she was raised in the home of an older brother, who treated her and his children as his personal servants. Maire left the house after years of mistreatment and abuse, swearing she would give only kindness and compassion to her own children.

  No one else was with them at their end of the railcar, so the boys became quite comfortable with their grandmother. They took turns sitting in her lap and telling her all about what happened after she left Rochester. She hugged them and grunted, “I hear ye, I hear ye,” again and again. Not a word of disapproval did she speak. When they fell silent, if she thought they still had more to say, she asked a question or two that got them talking once again.

  When she figured they had said all they needed, she asked if they would like to hear
a bit about Half Night O’Toole. “Or are ye too tired, now?” The boys seated on the opposite bench quickly straightened and nodded eagerly at the prospect of the story. “Well then,” she said by way of beginning, “here’s how it happened that one night, when Half Night was walkin’ home . . .” Maire’s eyes lit up and her cheeks burned a bright red as the spirit of the Celtic muse possessed her. From that moment, her audience of two was enthralled with her and her story. Nothing else mattered, not the scenery outside the window, not the steady rattle of the cars on the tracks, only the spellbinding adventures of their favorite Mallow character. She told numerous episodes of outrageous coincidence and bold bravado that followed no clear direction but always featured a remarkable conclusion. When she finished one story, they urged her: “Tell another one, Gram.”

  “Is it true no one knew O’Toole’s real first name?” asked John, who knew the stories of the bold rogue by heart.

  “Indeed, ’tis no lie, John. No one but his mother, and she was long dead when first the world heard of him. The whole of Mallow, old to young, knew him as ‘Half Night’ and nothin’ else. Half Night preyed on constables, government agents, and English landlords. Hands came out of the dark and choked them, stole their meat, vegetables, and tools, which then appeared on the stoop of some poor family.”

  “The story I like best about Half Night is ‘The Banshee of Braker Bridge,’” Pat enthused. “Tell it again, Gram.”

  So Maire began the tale with new details of daring thefts and unfortunate but humorous accidents that befell police and English authorities. “It was they as well as the neighbors who created the name and the Half Night legend that spread through County Cork.” The train car resounded with peals of the boys’ high-pitched laughter. “I never heard it quite like that before,” John exclaimed, as he flailed his arms in the air and shook his head. “Are you sure you didn’t just make it up, Gram?”

  Maire reached across the aisle and slapped John gently on the shoulder, smiling broadly, her head moving side to side, her bosom and belly rising up and down.