PEGLEG AND PADDY SAVE THE WORLD
By
Jonathan Maberry
“The Rush of Refugees through the Potter's Field toward Lincoln Park”
by Theodore R. Davis
Courtesy of the Chicago History Museum
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 Jonathan Maberry Productions LLC
All Rights Reserved
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I know what you’ve heard but Pat O’Leary’s cow didn’t have nothing to do with it. Not like they said in the papers. The way them reporters put it you’d thought the damn cow was playing with matches. I mean, sure, it started in the cowshed, but that cow was long dead by that point, and really it was Pat himself who lit it. I helped him do it. And that meteor shower some folks talked about—you see, that happened beforehand. It didn’t start the fire either, but it sure as hell caused it.
You have to understand what the West Side of Chicago was like back then. Pat had a nice little place on DeKoven Street—just enough land to grow some spuds and raise a few chickens. The cow was a skinny old milker, and she was of that age where her milk was too sour and her beef would probably be too tough. Pat O’Leary wanted to sell her to some drovers who were looking to lay down some jerky for a drive down to Abilene, but the missus would have none of it.
“Elsie’s like one of the family!” Catherine protested. “Aunt Sophie gave her to me when she was just a heifer.”
I knew Pat had to bite his tongue not to ask if Catherine meant when the cow was a heifer or when Sophie was. By that point in their marriage Paddy’s tongue was crisscrossed with healed-over bite marks.
Catherine finished up by saying, “Selling that cow’d be like selling Aunt Sophie herself off by the pound.”
Over whiskey that night Paddy confided in me that if he could find a buyer for Sophie he’d love to sell the old bitch. “She eats twice as much as the damn cow and don’t smell half as good.”
I agreed and we drank on it.
Shame the way she went. The cow, I mean. I wouldn’t wish that on a three-legged dog. As for Sophie…well, I guess in a way I feel sorry for her, too. And for the rest of them that died that night, the ones in the fire…and the ones who died before.
The fire started Sunday night, but the problem started way sooner, just past midnight on a hot Tuesday morning. That was a strange autumn. Dryer than it should have been, and with a steady wind that you’d have thought blew straight in off a desert. I never saw anything like it except the Santa Ana’s, but this was Illinois, not California. Father Callahan had a grand ol’ time with it, saying that it was the hot breath of Hell blowing hard on all us sinners, but we wasn’t sinning any worse that year than we had the year before and the year before that. Conner O’Malley was still sneaking into the Widow Daley’s back door every Saturday night, the Kennedy twins were still stealing hogs, and Paddyand I were still making cheap whiskey and selling it in premium bottles to the pubs who sold it to travelers heading west. No reason Hell should have breathed any harder that year than any other.
What was different that year was not what we sinners were doing but what those saints were up to, ’cause we had shooting stars every night for a week. The good father had something to say about that, too. It was the flaming sword of St. Michael and his lot, reminding us of why we were tossed out of Eden. That man could make a hellfire and brimstone sermon out of a field full of fuzzy bunnies, I swear to God.
On the first night there was just a handful of little ones, like Chinese fireworks way out over Lake Michigan. But the second night there was a big ball of light—Biela’s Comet the reporter from the Tribune called it—and it just burst apart up there and balls of fire came a’raining down everywhere.
Pat and I were up at the still and we were trying to sort out how to make Mean-Dog Mulligan pay the six months’ worth of whiskey fees he owed us. Mean-Dog was a man who earned his nickname and he was bigger than both of us put together, so when we came asking for our cash and he told us to piss off, we did. We only said anything out loud about it when we were a good six blocks from his place.
“We’ve got to sort him out,” I told Paddy, “or everyone’ll take a cue from him and then where will we be?”
Pat was feeling low. Mean-Dog had smacked him around a bit, just for show, and my poor lad was in the doldrums. His wife was pretty but she was a nag; her aunt Sophie was more terrifying than the red Indians who still haunted some of these woods, and Mean-Dog Mulligan was turning us into laughingstocks. Pat wanted to brood, and brooding over a still of fresh whiskey at least takes some of the sting out. It was after our fourth cup that we saw the comet.
Now, I’ve seen comets before. I seen them out at sea before I lost my leg, and I seen ’em out over the plains when I was running with the Scobie gang. I know what they look like, but this one was just a bit different. It was green, for one thing. Comets don’t burn green, not any I’ve seen or heard about. This one was a sickly green, too, the color of bad liver, and it scorched a path through the air. Most of it burned up in the sky, and that’s a good thing, but one piece of it came down hard by the edge of the lake, right smack down next to Aunt Sophie’s cottage.
Pat and I were sitting out in our lean-to in a stand of pines, drinking toasts in honor of Mean-Dog developing a wasting sickness when the green thing came burning down out of the sky and smacked into the ground not fifty feet from Sophie’s place. There was a sound like fifty cannons firing all at once and the shock rolled up the hill to where we sat. Knocked both of us off our stools and tipped over the still.
“Pegleg!” Pat yelled as he landed on his ass. “The brew!”
I lunged for the barrel and caught it before it tilted too far, but a gallon of it splashed me in the face and half-drowned me. That’s just a comment, not a complaint. I steadied the pot as I stood up. My clothes were soaked with whiskey but I was too shocked to even suck my shirttails. I stood staring down the slope. Sophie’s cottage still stood, but it was surrounded by towering flames. Green flames, and that wasn’t the whiskey talking. There were real green flames licking at the night, catching the grass, burning the trees that edged her property line.
“That’s Sophie’s place,” I said.
He wiped his face and squinted through the smoke. “Yeah, sure is.”
“She’s about to catch fire.”
He belched. “If I’m lucky.”
I grinned at him. It was easy to see his point. Except for Catherine there was nobody alive who could stand Aunt Sophie. She was fat and foul, and you couldn’t please her if you handed her a deed to a gold mine. Not even Father Callahan liked her and he was sort of required to by license.
We stood there and watched as the green fire crept along the garden path toward her door. “Suppose we should go down there and kind of rescue her, like,” I suggested.
He bent and picked up a tin cup, dipped it in the barrel, drank a slug and handed it to me. “I suppose.”
“Catherine will be mighty upset if we let her burn.”
“I expect.”
We could hear her screaming now as she finally realized that Father Callahan’s hellfire had come a’knocking. Considering her evil ways, she probably thought that’s just what it was, and had it been, not even she co
uld have found fault with the reasoning.
“Come on,” Pat finally said, tugging on my sleeve, “I guess we’d better haul her fat ass outta there or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Be the Christian thing to do,” I agreed, though truth to tell we didn’t so much as hustle down the slope to her place as saunter.
That’s what saved our lives in the end, ’cause we were still only halfway down when the second piece of the comet hit. This time it hit her cottage fair and square.
It was like the fist of God—if His fist was ever green, mind—punching down from Heaven and smashing right through her roof. The whole house just flew apart, the roof blew off, the windows turned to glittery dust, and the log walls splintered into matchwood. The force of it was so strong that it just plain sucked the air out of the fire, like blowing out a candle.
Patrick started running about then, and since he has two legs and I got this peg I followed along as best I could. Took us maybe ten minutes to get all the way down there.
By that time Sophie Kilpatrick was deader’n a doornail.
We stopped outside the jagged edge of what had been her north wall and stared at her just lying there amid the wreckage. Her bed was smashed flat, the legs broke; the dresser and rocker were in pieces, all the crockery in fragments. In the midst of it, still wearing her white nightgown and bonnet, was Sophie, her arms and legs spread like a starfish, her mouth open like a bass, her goggle eyes staring straight up at Heaven in the most accusing sort of way.
We exchanged a look and crept inside.
“She looks dead,” he said.
“Of course she’s dead, Pat, a comet done just fell on her.”
The fire was out but there was still a bit of green glow coming off her and we crept closer still.
“What in tarnation is that?”
“Dunno,” I said. There were bits and pieces of green rock scattered around her, and it glowed like it had a light inside. Kind of pulsed in a way, like a slow heartbeat. Sophie was dusted with glowing green powder. It was on her gown and her hands and her face. A little piece of the rock pulsed inside her mouth, like she’d gasped it in as it all happened.
“What’s that green stuff?”
“Must be that comet they been talking about in the papers. Biela’s Comet they been calling it.”
“Why’d it fall on Sophie?”
“Well, Pat, I don’t think it meant to.”
He grunted as he stared down at her. The green pulsing of the rock made it seem like she was breathing and a couple of times he bent close to make sure.
“Damn,” he said after he checked the third time, “I didn’t think she’d ever die. Didn’t think she could!”
“God kills everything,” I said, quoting one of Father Callahan’s cheerier observations. “Shame it didn’t fall on Mean-Dog Mulligan.”
“Yeah, but I thought Sophie was too damn ornery to die. Besides, I always figured the Devil’d do anything he could to keep her alive.”
I looked at him. “Why’s that?”
“He wouldn’t want the competition. You know she ain’t going to Heaven and down in Hell…well, she’ll be bossing around old Scratch and his demons before her body is even cold in the grave. Ain’t nobody could be as persistently disagreeable as Aunt Sophie.”
“Amen to that,” I said and sucked some whiskey out of my sleeve. Pat noticed what I was doing and asked for a taste. I held my arm out to him. “So…what you think we should do?”
Pat looked around. The fire was out, but the house was a ruin. “We can’t leave her out here.”
“We can call the constable,” I suggested. “Except that we both smell like whiskey.”
“I think we should take her up to the house, Peg.”
I stared at him. “To the house? She weighs nigh on half a ton.”
“She can’t be more than three hundred-weight. Catherine will kill me if I leave her out here to get gnawed on by every creature in the woods. She always says I was too hard on Sophie, too mean to her. She sees me bringing Sophie’s body home, sees how I cared enough to do that for her only living aunt, then she’ll think better of me.”
“Oh, man….” I complained, but Pat was adamant. Besides, when he was in his cups Pat complained that Catherine was not being very “wifely” lately. I think he was hoping that this would somehow charm him back onto Catherine’s side of the bed. Mind you, Pat was as drunk as a lord, so this made sense to him, and I was damn near pickled, so it more or less made sense to me, too. Father Callahan could have gotten a month’s worth of hellfire sermons on the dangers of hard liquor out of the way Pat and I handled this affair. Of course, Father Callahan’s dead now, so there’s that.
Anyway, we wound up doing as Pat said and we near busted our guts picking up Sophie and slumping her onto a wheelbarrow. We dusted off the green stuff as best we could, but we forgot about the piece in her mouth and the action of dumping her on the ’barrow must have made that glowing green chunk slide right down her gullet. If we’d been a lot less drunk we’d have wondered about that, because on some level I was pretty sure I heard her swallow that chunk, but since she was dead and we were grunting and cursing trying to lift her, and it couldn’t be real anyway, I didn’t comment on it. All I did once she was loaded was peer at her for a second to see if that great big bosom of hers was rising and falling—which it wasn’t—and then I took another suck on my sleeve.
It took near two hours to haul her fat ass up the hill and through the streets and down to Pat’s little place on DeKoven Street. All the time I found myself looking queer at Sophie. I hadn’t liked that sound, that gulping sound, even if I wasn’t sober or ballsy enough to say anything to Pat. It made me wonder, though, about that glowing green piece of comet. What the hell was that stuff, and where’d it come from? It weren’t nothing normal, that’s for sure.
We stood out in the street for a bit with Pat just staring at his own front door, mopping sweat from his face, careful of the bruises from Mean-Dog. “I can’t bring her in like this,” he said, “it wouldn’t be right.”
“Let’s put her in the cowshed,” I suggested. “Lay her out on the straw and then we can fetch the doctor. Let him pronounce her dead all legal like.”
For some reason that sounded sensible to both of us, so that’s what we did. Neither of us could bear to try and lift her again so we tipped over the barrow and let her tumble out.
“Ooof!” she said.
“Excuse me,” Pat said, and then we both froze.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both looked at Aunt Sophie. My throat was suddenly as dry as an empty shot glass.
Pat’s face looked like he’d seen a ghost and we were both wondering if that’s what we’d just seen in fact. We crouched over her, me still holding the arms of the barrow, him holding one of Sophie’s wrists.
“Tell me if you feel a pulse, Paddy my lad,” I whispered.
“Not a single thump,” he said.
“Then did you hear her say ‘ooof’ or some suchlike?”
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”
“Lying’s not always a sin,” I observed.
He dropped her wrist, then looked at the pale green dust on his hands—the glow had faded—and wiped his palms on his coveralls.
“Is she dead or isn’t she?” I asked.
He bent and with great reluctance pressed his ear to her chest. He listened for a long time. “There’s no ghost of a heartbeat,” he said.
“Be using a different word now, will ya?”
Pat nodded. “There’s no heartbeat. No breath, nothing.”
“Then she’s dead?”
“Aye.”
“But she made a sound.”
Pat straightened, then snapped his fingers. “It’s the death rattle,” he said. “Sure and that’s it. The dead exhaling a last breath.”
“She’s been dead these two hours and more. What’s she been waiting for?”
He thought about that. “It was the
stone. The green stone—it lodged in her throat and blocked the air. We must have dislodged it when we dumped her out and that last breath came out. Just late is all.”
I was beginning to sober up and that didn’t have the ring of logic it would have had an hour ago.
We stood over her for another five minutes, but Aunt Sophie just lay there, dead as can be.
“I got to go tell Catherine,” Pat said eventually. “She’s going to be in a state. You’d better scram. She’ll know what we’ve been about.”
“She’ll know anyway. You smell as bad as I do.”
“But Sophie smells worse,” he said, and that was the truth of it.
So I scampered and he went in to break his wife’s heart. I wasn’t halfway down the street before I heard her scream.
* * *
I didn’t come back until Thursday and as I came up the street, smoking my pipe, Pat came rushing around the side of the house. I swear he was wearing the same overalls and looked like he hadn’t washed or anything. The bruises had faded to the color of a rotten eggplant but his lip was less swollen. He grabbed me by the wrist and fair wrenched my arm out dragging me back to the shed; but before he opened the door he stopped and looked me square in the eye.
“You got to promise me to keep a secret, Pegleg.”
“I always keep your secrets,” I lied, and he knew I was lying.
“No, you have to really keep this one. Swear by the baby Jesus.”
Pat was borderline religious, so asking me to swear by anything holy was a big thing for him. The only other time he’d done it was right before he showed me the whiskey still.
“Okay, Paddy, I swear by the baby Jesus and His Holy Mother, too.”
He stared at me for a moment before nodding; then he turned and looked up and down the alley as if all the world was leaning out to hear whatever Patrick O’Leary had to say. All I saw was a cat sitting on a stack of building bricks distractedly licking his bollocks. In a big whisper Pat said, “Something’s happened to Sophie.”