The Garden of Martyrs

Front Cover
Macmillan, 2004 - 359 pages
Two Irish Catholic immigrants, Dominic Daley and James Halligan, were traveling west on the Boston Post Road, headed for New York. A man named Marcus Lyon was robbed and killed along the same road. Though the two Irishmen denied any knowledge of the crime, they were arrested and accused of the murder. They spent five months in jail. Only two days before their trial they were allowed to consult with a lawyer. The trial, a mockery of justice, lasted only one day. The two were sentenced to be hanged by the neck and, as the presiding judge said, "their bodies dissected and anatomized."

Father Cheverus, an émigré priest from France and one of only two Roman Catholic priests in all of New England at the time, is asked by Daley's wife and mother to go to the cell to comfort them, listen to their confessions, offer them communion. Father Cheverus, who escaped the Terror of the French Revolution, is a man plagued by his own past. Daley, a simple family man with a young son, and Halligan, a slick type with a checkered past and a lost love, face their deaths bravely, only to be exonerated in 1984.

Michael White has used his considerable talent to capture the political, social and cultural aspects of New England. In this heartbreaking story, he shows that the anti-Catholic and anti-foreign sentiments of that period in some ways reflect ongoing prejudice today.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
3
Section 3
30
Section 4
61
Section 5
85
Section 6
87
Section 7
113
Section 8
134
Section 12
215
Section 13
232
Section 14
249
Section 15
271
Section 16
289
Section 17
310
Section 18
329
Section 19
348

Section 9
160
Section 10
187
Section 11
213
Section 20
355
Section 21
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2004)

Michael C. White is a professor of English, as well as, the founder and director of the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program at Fairfield University. He is the founding editor of the annual fiction anthology American Fiction, as well as Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. In addition to a collection of shorts stories, entitled Marked Men, White has written numerous novels. They include: The Garden of Martyrs, A Brother's Blood, Beautiful Assassin, Soul Catcher, A Dream of Wolves and The Blind Side of the Heart.

Bibliographic information