The One That Got Away - Diana Rubino

The One That Got Away by Diana Rubino

Book excerpt

Surrattsville, Maryland, April, 1854

“My children need a better life than this. Look at you—you’re unfit to be a husband or a father!” Ma’s wailing disrupted Johnny’s sleep and jolted him wide awake. Oh no, not another ruckus ending in Pa’s stomping off and Ma sobbing. He pulled the covers over his head.

“How can a helpless woman like me save their young minds—and souls?” Ma’s plea reached Johnny’s ears. He trembled, struck with panic. My soul needs to be saved? As those horrifying words echoed in his mind, Johnny slid out of bed and crept to the top step, pressing his forehead against the banister railings. If Ma couldn’t save his soul, he needed someone who could.

“Some parishioners get a good Catholic education for their children, but they have their husbands’ support, which I sorely lack,” Ma groused, her back to Johnny. He pictured a bitter tear running down her cheek. Poor Ma wept a lot these days. His heart ached for her. He longed to comfort her but didn’t dare go to her aid and endure Pa’s wrath. “God bless my noble undertaking.”

“Oh, give it up, woman!” Pa flung a cheroot to the floor and pounded it out. “There’s good enough schools without Papist teachings.”

“John, you are a blasphemer!” Ma sometimes used words Johnny—or Pa—didn’t understand. “Worse than a misguided Protestant, you’re a complete non-believer.”

Pa flipped his hand as if to smack Ma. “You knew I wasn’t a mackerel-snapper when we married. At least I let you baptize Isaac and Annah.”

“Yes.” Her voice lowered, defeated. “I am like the Eugenia of old. Her name epitomizes my own life. I would convert my family to the faith of the Holy Mother Church.”

“Christ!” Pa kicked a chair. It crashed and splintered against the wall. “I even let you baptize my bastard son.” Another family sore point that brought shame and ridicule upon the Surratts, especially in church, under nasty glares. Pa shouldn’t have brought it up. Johnny’s half-brother was named John William Harrison by his mother, Caroline Sanderson, who signed the legal papers “Caroline Sarath,” in a misspelled attempt to lay the blame where it belonged. In response to Miss Sanderson’s plea, the county court adjudged Pa responsible for the boy’s upkeep.

“Fine wedding present that was, sir!” Ma’s voice quivered, a sure sign she was about to weep. “Four months after our wedding, and me already in the family way with Isaac.”

“Well, I done let you do it.” Pa took a swig from his bottle.

“It wasn’t his fault his father was irresponsible,” Ma shot back. “I gave you my gracious acceptance of your affair. You are cruel, John, too cruel!”

“I, cruel?” Pa rasped. “And wha—wha’bout you?” He slurred his speech.

Johnny grimaced in disgust. Once again, Pa’s lushy. “You oughta let well enough alone, Mary. You needs learn to leave things be. Hell’s bells, you’re in such a hurry to convert the world, you sold your own salvation by violating the Seventh Commandment. With a priest of all people!”

Ma raised and lowered her hands. “Shhh, not so loud, lest the children hear!”

But Johnny had already heard—although he didn’t get the full meaning of “sold salvation”—and the Seventh Commandment? What was that?

“Bah! Little damned late for that, ain’t it?” Pa’s voice receded as he turned his back on her. “They heered it. It’s rumored all over the county.”

“Only because you cannot keep your inebriated trap shut!” They retreated to opposite corners, seething. Ma grabbed a bottle of Pa’s and flung it into the fire. Glass exploded, shattering the silence.

“I would be well within my legal rights to shoot you without mercy, woman.” Pa stomped across the room and halted before Ma. “No jury would convict me for your cuckolding. You ruined my family name and made me the joke of the county.”

Johnny’s heart took a sickening leap. No! Pa wouldn’t shoot her! He silently vowed to bury every gun in the house first, knowing where Pa kept all three of them.

“If anything has ruined your name and made a fool of you in this county, it is not my action but yours. You are a perpetual sot, sir.” Ma’s slippers scuffed across the floor as she backed away. “Your whore is the bottle. You run up more debts each year. I try with all my might to keep this disgrace as much of a secret as I can, but your tawdry public displays of drunkenness, indebtedness, fornication…”

Fearing a physical exchange between his parents, Johnny perched at the top step, ready to burst into the parlor. Ma slid the pistol from its holster hanging from her chair. A cold puckering ran up Johnny’s spine. But Pa held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. Will she shoot him anyways? Johnny swallowed a lump of fear and held his breath. To his relief, Ma held the gun out, butt first.

“Here! You go’head and kill me, John. It’ll relieve me of the burden of being your wife and having to run this place. As for justifying my murder, try it and see how the courts treat you. You’ll hang within the month. I will see you in hell, sir. In thirty days!”

Pa spat at her and stormed out. He slammed the door behind him, rattling the window panes.

Johnny turned and skulked off to bed, swiping at tears with his fist. Desperate to escape but needing to stay and protect her—he’d never felt so torn in his life.

He slipped back under the covers and whispered, “Where has it all gone so wrong, dear God? What made Pa such a poor businessman to run a saloon that’s destroying the family? Is it my fault? If it is, what did I do to deserve the grief you’ve visited upon us? Why does he worship the bottle rather than Our Lord Jesus Christ?”

Oh, if only Pa could accept Christ, as he did. The call of the priesthood grew stronger every day.

* * *

Mary Surratt faced a dead end. Not even the arrival of Father Finotti’s brother Gustavo from Italy took the edge off her worries about her children’s future. But Gustavo married a local girl and established his own plantation a mile from the church, calling it “Italian Hill.” Now Mary had new companions to help her pass the time.

In between visits to Gustavo and his new bride, a welcome diversion from her anxiety-fraught days, Mary dreaded the future and the completion of her new tavern home. She feared the establishment would attract an undesirable element—a danger to her children and a risk to the entire family’s safety.

Sitting with Father Finotti at her scarred kitchen table, she poured tea into her grandma’s delicate cups and placed a sprig of home-grown mint on his saucer.

“I don’t know what’s worse—when John is away in Virginia building the railroad, or home drinking.” She released a forlorn sigh. “As for Annah, what kind of a place will a tavern be for a young lady to grow up in? I would like to send the boys to Boston College and Annah to Frederick, but I lack the money. Oh, Father, what can I do?”

“If you can’t afford to send the boys to Boston and Annah to Frederick, then why not pick some local school?” Father Finotti sipped his tea. “You can apply for aid from the Church to reduce tuition.”

“Right now I send the children to good schools, with no support from my husband—this is from a small inheritance from my father. When that’s gone—” She couldn’t bear to finish the thought. “I don’t want to beg the Church. It’s too humiliating. But I so wish a good education for my children. God forbid my boys should inherit any of John’s sinful proclivities.”

“What are the young’uns doing these days?” He chewed on the mint sprig.

“Isaac got himself a clerk’s job in Baltimore. Annah’s still at the Misses Martins’ Female Academy, and Johnny wants to become a student for the priesthood. I’m thrilled at the prospect of him becoming a man of the cloth, away from the sins of the world, the constant temptations that goad young men. Most of all, history won’t repeat itself. He won’t follow in his father’s debauched footsteps.”