The Journey of Addie Boyd

Prologue

March 22, 1916
 
     The coffin was black with silver trimmings—a rather ornate affair to house such an ordinary looking corpse, I thought.  The deceased was an old man, fat and bald, a most unremarkable body dressed in a black suit that had seen much use.  A pink carnation, pinned to the lapel, mocked the garish rouge that had been liberally applied to the old man’s cheeks and lips. The hands, crossed upon his breast, were large, well shaped, and surprisingly smooth.  They could have belonged to a younger man who had lived an easy life.  I stared down at the dead man for several moments and tried to find some trace of the young cavalier I had heard so much about, but he was buried too deep within the folds of aged flesh for a stranger such as I to see.
    

     The funeral home was filled to capacity and the crowd spilled out through the vestibule, onto the verandah and into the street.  Outside, the mourners were a loud and sociable bunch.  There was a good deal of greeting between old friends, the retelling of stories, and the passing of whiskey flasks. At the front of the great room where the bier stood, the atmosphere was more somber as befitted the occasion.  Women in black mourning garb occupied the first row of seats like so many sad ravens.  Two were quite elderly, while the others, a half-dozen in number, were women in their middling years.  They were, I assumed, the sisters and nieces of the dearly departed for they all bore a faint resemblance to the corpse and it was well known that no wife or children survived the dead man.  As I turned to take my leave of the body, I found that all the bereaved ladies were looking at me.  Staring earnestly but not unkindly, they seemed to be searching my face for the answer to a most understandable question.  Who is this strange woman that’s come to mourn our cold kinsman?
    

     I nodded demurely in their direction and said softly, “Sorry for your trouble” and strode quickly from the room.
    

     It took some minutes of maneuvering through the ever-growing crowd to reach the hack that I had hired at the train station.  In most cities, automobiles and streetcars were the most common public conveyances, but here in the tiny hamlet of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, a horse-drawn carriage could still be had.  A band of aged gentlemen, dressed in bits and pieces of faded Confederate uniforms milled about my carriage, some speaking to the driver while others seemed more interested in the horse.  They politely doffed their caps and stepped aside at my approach, but from behind me an insistent voice called.
    

      “Excuse me, Ma’am.  May I have a moment of your time?”
    

     I turned to see a young man in a rumpled suit looking expectantly at me.

     “I don’t know you,” I said.  “What do you want?”
    

      “I’m a reporter, Ma’am.  For the Liberty Tribune.”  He took a small notepad from his jacket pocket and flourished it as if that explained everything.
    

     “That doesn’t answer my question.  What do you want?”
    

      “Just a few questions, Ma’am.”  He flipped back the cover of the notepad and took a stubby pencil from his shirt pocket.  “First of all, what is your name?”
    

      “I don’t see where that’s any of your business,” I said coldly.  “And I can’t imagine why your readers, if you have any, would be interested.”  I stepped up into the carriage and closed the door.
    

      “Wait!” the reporter shouted at my driver.  “Are you kidding?”  This rude question was apparently meant for me.  He pointed his pencil back toward the funeral home.  “That’s a famous man in there!  The last of the great outlaws.  He rode with Jesse James and before that, Quantrill.  That’s Cole Younger in there, lady!”
    

      “I’m well aware of who’s lying in there and I’m familiar with Mr. Younger’s reputation.”  I fixed him with a look that I had practiced over my many years.  It was a malevolent glare that never failed to discourage the most obnoxious of males.  The pipsqueak reporter had the gall to ignore it!
    

      “But what I want to know—what my readers will want to know is...” He pushed his hat back on his head and gave me a lewd grin.  “What was your relationship with Cole Younger?”
    

      “I had no relationship with Mr. Younger.”  I was blunt.  “I never met the man.”
    

      “I find that hard to believe.”  The insolent pup squinted at me.  “Why then, are you here?”
    

      “I am here, young man, to convey the respects of another.  A friend of both the deceased and myself.  A friend who could not be here today.”
    

     “I see.”  He scribbled furiously in his notepad.  “And who is this friend?”
    

      “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”  I leaned out of the carriage window and called, “Driver!”
    

      “Wait!”  The reporter stopped his scribbling and looked pleadingly at me.  “Please, lady.”  He stretched out his arms and turned his palms upward in supplication.  “Cole Younger—the great outlaw and a woman of mystery— there’s got to be a story here.  Won’t you tell it to me?”
    

     The hack driver finally decided it was time to go and the buggy lurched forward.  I smiled sweetly and waved to the hapless reporter.  “Goodbye, young man.”
 
    

      The little turd was right about one thing.  There was a story here—a story that should be told.  But I will do the telling. 
    

      My name is Fiona Aideen Feeny, though I doubt there remains a living soul who would remember my given name. I have been known throughout my life as Fiona Kelly and, at times, as Molly St. Patrick, Nellie Kelly, Margaret Boyd and a few other aliases to boot.  I was born in Ireland, in County Galway in 1852 during the great potato famine.  My father was a sweet fool of a man named Ronan Patrick Feeny.  My mother, who was nobody’s fool, was named Shauna Maeve O’Mara until she consented to become Mrs. R. P. Feeny.
    

     As I told the fool reporter, I had never met Coleman Younger. I attended his funeral at the behest of Adelia Boyd, a woman I first met in a brothel in Dallas, Texas.  It was the spring of 1866—I was not quite fifteen years old.  Miss Boyd, who was called Addie by all who knew her, was a woman of business and she hired me on the spot.
 
   
Chapter 1  
 
Fiona’s Diary – April 18, 1866.  A warm morning – too warm for this time of year.  Sally has the clap again.  Says she caught it from a buffalo hunter, but I’m beginning to think she was born with it.  Ermy’s in a foul mood and threw a shoe at me.  Sometimes I wish…
 
      “Fee!”  The girl, Fee, closed her diary and slid it behind a large crock that stood on the floor of the pantry.  She kept the diary hidden here because no one ever came into the pantry except Juana the cook.  Juana couldn’t read but she could keep a secret and Fee was allowed the privacy of the tiny pantry provided she caused no mischief that would reflect badly on the cook. 
    

     Fee leaned around the kitchen doorway and answered the summons.  “Coming, Ermy.”  She scurried out through the kitchen and down the long hallway, her dirty bare feet skipping lightly over the floorboards. She paused at the door of Ermy’s room and dropped her pencil into the torn pocket of her homespun dress.
    

     Ermaline Baxter lay on her bed, two pillows beneath her head while two more supported her swollen, gout-inflamed feet. Her rheumy eyes stared blankly at the ceiling as she fanned herself lazily with a newspaper, the faint breeze caused a few wisps of her gray hair to flutter ever so slightly.  Besides the gout, Ermy was stricken with arthritis, ulcers, varicose veins, halitosis, and every other malady that can befall an old woman of intemperate habits.  Despite her infirmities, Madame Baxter could still administer a good beating if provoked by inattentive servants.
    

      Fee wrinkled her nose.  The room had a sour smell—the result of having to shelter Ermaline Baxter for nearly twenty-four hours of each day.  The old woman seldom left the room, preferring to be waited on hand and foot. Looking down, Fee considered the ancient, mottled skin of her employer’s face, the hairy legs, the distended belly that rose and fell beneath the faded housecoat.  She tried to imagine Ermy in her flowering youth, struggling to picture the beautiful young courtesan that Ermy always claimed to have been. An enchantress she was, or so Ermy told it.  Men fought duels over her and more than one smitten fellow took his own life rather than live without her.  Women envied her beauty, she boasted, but Fee just couldn’t see it.  Ermy Baxter looked exactly like what she was, Fee thought—a broken down old whore running a broken down old whorehouse.
    

      “Fiona,” Ermy wheezed, invoking the girl’s Christian name, “I’m parched.  Bring me another glass of sherry.”  The old woman waved her newspaper toward the nightstand where an empty tumbler stood.  “And bring it in a fresh glass, y’hear?”
    

      “Yes, Ma’am.”  The girl picked up the tumbler and turned to the door.
    

      “Not so fast, girlie!”  Fee stopped in her tracks and awaited further instruction.  “Take that slop jar with you and scrub it out good before you bring it back.  I’m tired of smellin’ my own dirt.”
    

      Fiona dutifully retrieved the chamber pot from the far side of Madame Baxter’s bed and, stifling an urge to drench the old woman with its contents, she removed the offensive receptacle from the room.  Passing through the kitchen, she set the tumbler down on the sideboard and carried the pot out onto the back porch to be dealt with later.
    

      “Doan you be leavin’ dat old pisspot there!” Juana scolded.  “You empty dat fo somebody be kickin’ it over and messin’ up mah porch.”
    

      Fiona sighed but obeyed.  She never argued with Juana and neither did anyone else.  Well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and muscular limbs, Juana was a formidable presence.  She had tamed many a roughneck with no more than a threatening stare and beaten those foolish enough to call her bluff. She was of mixed blood – black and Mexican she claimed, though she never said which of her parents was what.  Her skin was dark as strong coffee but her glossy straight hair and aquiline nose betrayed her Spanish blood and gave the big woman an exotic look.  Where and when she was born, Juana would not say though she often referred to herself as “freeborn.”
    

      After finishing her toilet duties, Fiona returned to the kitchen to fetch Ermy’s sherry.  “Her majesty would like another sip of wine, if you please, and it had better be in a clean goblet, by Jaysus,” she said to no one in particular.
    

      Juana was not religious but considered it bad luck to invoke the name of any god, except in prayer.  “Doan blaspheme, chile.  Even when you say it funny.”
    

      “It can’t be helped.  I speak like my Da.”  Fiona refused to make any attempt to domesticate her speech even though Ermy sometimes threatened to sell her to a Mexican pimp if she didn’t “learn to talk good English.” Instead, the girl clung to her Irish brogue like a cherished memory of better days.  She rinsed the glass under the pitcher pump and wiped it dry with a piece of sacking before filling it from a bottle of cooking sherry.  Fiona sniffed the wine and made a face.
    

      The house was quiet in the mornings.  The working girls never rose before noon, and Fiona took care not to make a sound as she made her way down the long hallway.  She knew which floorboards would squeak when trod upon and she stepped lightly over them.  Peering into Ermy’s room she saw that the old woman was snoring softly, mouth agape.  Fiona set the sherry down gingerly on the nightstand, tiptoed out of room and carefully retraced her steps through the hall.  She closed the kitchen door behind her and realizing that she had been holding her breath, let it out in a long whoosh.
   

       Juana was tying on her sunbonnet.  “Peel some ‘o dem taters, chile.  Ah need some things from town.”  With her soft bag in hand, the big cook lumbered off.
    

      Fiona filled a large mixing bowl with potatoes from a bin in the pantry.  She removed the skins with a sharp paring knife and let the peelings drop into a bucket at her feet.  The girl seldom looked at a spud that she wasn’t reminded of the blight that blackened the potato crops in Ireland and forced so many families, like the Feenys, to emigrate. Fiona closed her eyes and thought of her Da.
   

       Ronan Patrick Feeny was a lighthearted soul with warm brown eyes and a smile so constant that he appeared forever ready to break into laughter.  In 1852 Ronan stepped onto the wharf in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife Shauna, their three-year-old son Connor, and infant daughter Fiona. The next ten years would see the Feeny family move from place to place as Ronan followed employment opportunities. By the time Abraham Lincoln took office, Shauna had given birth to four more healthy, hungry children.
    

      The early battles of the Civil War dispelled any notions that it would be a short-lived conflict, and soon the President was calling for thousands of additional troops and the institution of a national draft. The Feenys were now living in a wretched tenement in Philadelphia where Ronan found work as a hod carrier.  A wealthy young man accosted Ronan on the street one day and offered to buy him a drink at the nearest tavern.  Over mugs of beer, the man offered to pay Ronan Feeny three hundred dollars in cash if the Irishman would only join the army as a substitute for himself. It was a tremendous sum-
more than Ronan could make in a year of backbreaking work.  He would take the money, he told his wife, and join the Grand Army of the Potomac.  After a few weeks, he would slip quietly out of camp and return to his family.  “It happens all the time,” he said.  “They’re not likely to miss one skinny Irishman, are they now?”
    

      The following week, Shauna and the children saw Ronan off on a troop train bound for a training depot near Scranton.  Fiona never saw her father again.  At the camp, a clumsy recruit accidentally discharged his rifle.  The bullet whistled harmlessly through the entire camp before reaching the latrine on the far perimeter where Ronan Feeny was preparing to relieve himself.  He never knew what hit him.
    

      Shauna Feeny took one look at her weeping brood and recognized her situation as dire. More pragmatic than her dead husband, the new widow wasted little time grieving. Within a week of his father’s death, Connor, not yet thirteen, was sent to work in a tannery for bed and board and a weekly pittance paid directly to his mother.  Unable to find a similar situation for the ten-year-old Fiona, Shauna foisted the girl off on her cousin Liam, who had moved his own family to a farm in Texas.  “And don’t ever be comin’ back here, Fee,” were the last words her mother would say to her.  “You’ll not likely find us.”
    

      Fiona hated the dusty Texas farm and felt much the same about her mother’s kinfolk.  Cousin Liam and his skinny wife were a dour couple with four equally humorless offspring.  Though she was not abused, Fiona was constantly reminded that she was a most unwanted addition to the family.  A year to the day of her arrival, Liam announced that since he had heard no word from Shauna, it was time to make other arrangements.  He loaded Fiona and her scant belongings into his buckboard and drove to Dallas where, after some palaver, the girl was turned over to Ermaline Baxter.  Fiona suspected that some money changed hands that day, but Ermy always denied this.  Only out of the goodness of her tender heart did Ermy allow Fiona to scrub floors, change beds, boil sheets, empty slop jars, and perform countless other menial tasks.  For her efforts, the girl was given two meals per day and a straw-filled pallet on which to sleep.
    

      Fiona set down the knife and potato and tried to blink back her tears when the youngest of Ermy’s girls entered the kitchen.  Baby was blonde, doe-eyed and pudgy.  She was nineteen years old but looked much younger—though not as young as Ermy touted her to men who craved juvenile entertainments.  She was unschooled and not very bright or, as Juana liked to say, “dumber’n a goose”. 
    

      Looking up from the table, Fiona sniffed and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.  “Aw Fee,” Baby was sympathetic.  “You don’t have to peel any of them for me.  I hate onions.”

© Copyright 2006 Kirk

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