The Callahans: The Complete Series Read online

  THE CALLAHANS

  The Complete Series In Five Volumes

  Copyright 2011 Gordon Ryan

  Original Copyright in 1996 by Gordon Ryan

  as the Spirit of Union series

  Published by Pegasus Publishing

  Gordon Ryan Amazon Home Page

  Authors Note:

  Since original publication in 1996-1999 in hardback, under the series title, Spirit of Union, this historical fiction saga has achieved measurable success. Multiple readers in the USA and the UK have commented on the way the series weaves a spiritual thread throughout the story without overtly becoming a “Christian” novel. Most have found it compelling, yet not intrusive to the primary story of a family who face life each day, seeking to find the strength to endure the hardship and to enjoy the rewards.

  Released again in 2010/2011 under a new title, in both e-book and print editions, The Callahans is the story of a young man from Ireland and a young woman from Norway at the turn of the twentieth century. Over nearly seventy years, the family they create faces a world that is often at war, or in economic peril. Each volume speaks of individual family members who are at times confused by their choices and are alternately happy or sad, achieving success and failure.

  In other words, The Callahans depicts the common problems that everyday people face as they traverse life. Through the facility of fiction, Tom and Katrina can live their life with a few more financial resources then are generally available to most people, but what would a story be if it were not larger than life? They find, however, that money is not the source of happiness.

  The Callahans also presents the chronicle of a religious conflict that for many years separates two people who are deeply in love, with a differing faith, yet a commitment to each other. They confront these challenges in the hope that their God will be pleased with their effort.

  The story is not designed to proselyte or convert anyone to religion in general, or to a specific denomination, yet it does attempt to demonstrate that a faith which contains a value system of consideration for others is necessary to withstand the trials of humanity.

  Hopefully, you will not be offended by the religious sub-plot and come to love Thomas and Katrina and their children as much as I did while creating the story. If you so desire, I would be pleased to hear from you concerning your thoughts about one of my literary “children.”

  Gordon Ryan

  Christchurch, New Zealand

  August, 2011

  [email protected]

  For my beautiful wife, Colleen,

  a modern-day pioneer woman,

  who taught me that handcarts

  are not always visible.

  Destiny

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Cork, Ireland

  April, 1895

  It took Tom Callahan nearly a week to walk the hundred miles from Tipperary to Cork. Traveling mostly at night, to avoid any chance meeting with a curious constable, he arrived foot sore and hungry at his destination on the southern tip of Ireland. After a night’s rest, he walked another twenty miles to the port community of Queenstown, south of Cork where ocean liners took their passengers to a world beyond Ireland. Once there, he had saved the expense of renting a room by rigging a makeshift shelter out of the crates of sea freight stacked on the wharf.

  The morning after his arrival, the two stack Antioch arrived and moored nearby, and, having decided upon his course of action during his walk through Ireland, Tom booked passage on the steamer. Then for two days, he slept on the docks and kept to himself while waiting for the ship to sail. It was April, 1895, and he was anxious for a variety of reasons to leave Ireland behind him.

  The young Irishman spent part of those days amusing himself by watching the comings and goings of a very pretty, blonde young woman. From his hiding place on the wharf, he had been able to observe her without being seen. What he saw intrigued him. She was in the company of an older man and woman, whom Tom took to be her parents, two young girls, probably her sisters, and a young man who Tom guessed was an older brother. They were all apparently going to be passengers on the same vessel as Tom, and he had watched with interest as the young woman and her family busied themselves on and off the ship.

  One morning, after a half hour or so of activity on the ship, the family had walked down the gangway and past Tom’s hiding place. They crossed the wharf and went into one of the streets that led to the waterfront in Queenstown. Tom had only been close enough to overhear a snatch of their conversation, but he had enjoyed listening to the young woman’s laughter and watching the graceful way she made her way up and down the gangplank and around the wharf.

  Tom was intrigued. They were clearly not Irish or even English. He guessed they were speaking a Scandinavian language. Tom knew the young woman could speak English, though, because he had heard her asking directions of the ship’s First Officer. Whatever language she spoke, it had been pleasant to observe her and entertaining to imagine somehow being able to meet her once they were on board the ship and under way. The idea of sharing the sea voyage with a pretty lass made the prospects of spending nearly two weeks on the water less daunting.

  There was no doubt that Tom took a certain pleasure in observing a pretty face and a shapely figure. At nineteen years of age, he had already wooed his share of Irish “Colleens,” but there was something about this young lady that piqued his interest in an unusual way. While he was watching her, the sunlight broke through the overcast Irish skies and the light glinted off her blonde hair. She was tall—taller than most Irish girls—and had the figure and the carriage of a mature young woman, but her girlish laughter and the playful way she behaved with her little sisters made Tom wonder if she might not be younger than she appeared. No matter, he decided. She was certainly pretty enough to merit his attention and might provide some diversion during the voyage.

  It did occur to him that meeting her might be something of a problem. It was obvious that her family was wealthy. She and her mother wore full-length, high-necked dresses and tailored, dark wool coats. Tom noticed, too, that the ship’s captain behaved deferentially toward the young woman’s stern-looking, well-dressed father. Considering the steerage rules that had been explained to him when he purchased his ticket, Tom thought it might prove difficult to arrange a meeting. His passage provided only limited access to the upper decks of the ship, but it pleased him to think of making the attempt.

  The morning of the day the Antioch was to sail, Tom had a brief encounter that made him even more determined to meet the pretty, blonde woman. There was a good deal of noise and activity on the wharf as the sailors and dock hands made final preparations to embark. Hoping to buy something to eat before the ship got under way, and shivering from the cold, Tom stepped out onto the dock from his dank sleeping place and nearly bumped into her. She was with her brother.

  It was an overcast, chilly morning, and her face was flushed. She had plaited her thick blonde hair into a single, heavy braid. She wore no hat, but the two ringlets that curled down in front of her ears framed her fresh, young face in a way that struck Tom as very becoming. The thing that held his interest, though, was her eyes. They were a deep green color and even though she was momentarily startled by Tom’s sudden appearance in front of her, she smiled prettily and held his gaze for a moment before glancing away. The young woman’s brother greeted Tom with a nod and taking his sister by the arm, steered her around the crates and cargo toward the gangplank. Tom had not responded to the greeting except to instinctively scrape his cap from his head and stare at her as she passed. Now, as she and her brother walked away from him, he stood gazing after them. Those eyes and that face had been something
to see, no matter how young she was. The challenge of finding a way to meet her, Tom decided, would make an interesting diversion on his first sea voyage.

  Later that day, the gangplank would be hauled in, the giant ropes loosed, the ship’s massive horn would sound, and under an umbrella of noisy gulls, the Antioch would be under way. Tom had never been on board a ship, though he had seen many of them depart Ireland. This time, however, he would not watch it sail out through the breakwater nor observe the plume of smoke from the double stacks disappear over the horizon. Instead, standing at the railing on separate decks, Thomas Matthew Callahan, born October 5, 1875, in County Tipperary, Ireland, and Katrina Hansen, born June 15, 1878, in Horten, Norway, whom Tom had not yet had the pleasure of meeting, would be bound for America.

  The short voyage across the North Sea from Christiania, (the former name of Norway’s capital city until the name was changed in 1925 to Oslo) to Aberdeen followed by the long train ride through Scotland and England to Liverpool and the half-day sail from Liverpool to Cork, had been particularly tiring to Mrs. Hansen. But the ocean voyage across the Atlantic would begin tomorrow, and so Katrina had convinced her mother and sisters to take one last opportunity to walk about the village.

  There wasn’t much of interest to see in Cork. The seaport looked and smelled like the harbor in Christiania. Gulls screeched overhead, and the buildings as well as the seamen, who were moving about on the quay, seemed equally salt-encrusted. Katrina couldn’t, of course, remember it, but the port resembled, too, the one in Horten, the village located about eighty miles down the fjord from Christiania, where she had been born. Indeed, most harbors were alike—some bigger, some smaller.

  In the mid 1890s, the activity on the waterfront in most Norwegian cities was much diminished from the bustling days of whaling. In those more spirited times, ships would line the quay and hordes of people were always greeting or saying good-bye to family as the men of coastal villages put out to sea in pursuit of the great whales. By the late nineteenth century, however, the heyday of whaling had long passed. The discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1859 had caused a sharp decline in the industry. As the population of whales also declined, there was an international reduction in the chase, the sea hunt became harder, and voyages took seamen away from home for years at a time.

  As the whaling industry wound down, Lars Hansen had struggled to keep a ship’s chandlery business in operation in Horton, a business his father had started following the loss of his leg at sea. Realizing, in light of the declining ship’s traffic, that it was a losing battle, Lars had moved the family to Christiania and converted his shop-keeping and woodworking skills to furniture making—household necessities that he felt people would always need regardless of the changing economy. The Oslo enterprise had succeeded far beyond his expectations.

  In 1890, Christiania, Norway, was a bustling city, the center of the Norwegian struggle to wrest independence from Sweden. Ruled for centuries by Denmark, Norway had been ceded to Sweden by the Treaty of Kiel in 1813, following the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century. On May 17, 1814, shortly after the treaty was effected, Norway elected a king and its own parliament. By the time Lars Hansen arrived in Christiania in 1890, Norway was being governed under a constitutional monarchy in domestic matters, but Sweden still controlled foreign policy, and the Norwegians persisted in fomenting for complete independence.

  By 1893, Lars had established ties with cabinet makers across the Baltic Straits in Copenhagen, and it was on one of his buying trips to Denmark that he crossed paths with the man who would ultimately change his life and that of his family. Harold Stromberg, a young Mormon missionary from Salt Lake City, Utah, serving in the Scandinavian Mission of the church, impressed Mr. Hansen with his forthright presentation on religion. Lars invited Mr. Stromberg, should he ever travel to Christiania, to visit with his family and to share his beliefs. Late in 1893, as the mission grew and new territories were opened for proselytizing, Lars Hansen answered a knock on his door one crisp winter evening to find Elder Stromberg and another young man smiling at him and shaking snow from their overcoats. Within two months, the Hansen family, under Lars’s guidance and firm direction, had embraced the new faith and, to Lars’s way of thinking, a new future.

  During their initial visit in Denmark, Stromberg had told Hansen of the throngs of Mormon converts who were leaving European countries for America, a new land where equal opportunity was available to all its citizens and where like-minded people who wished to serve their God could do so in harmony with their neighbors. Such an idea appealed to Lars, and the rejection he experienced at the hands of former friends in the family’s Lutheran church, once they learned of his conversion to an upstart religion, solidified his decision. The Hansen’s would sell the store and immigrate to America. Mrs. Hansen found this a hard decision to accept, but the recent death of her elderly mother, whom Mrs. Hansen had been nursing, eased the transition. Propelled by the strong determination of Lars, the Hansen’s prepared to migrate to Zion.

  Strong religion was not a new thing to the Hansen’s. Lars’s father, Wolf Hansen, had been a devout Lutheran, adhering to the tenants of the state-sponsored church all of his life, and involving his family from the day of his wedding. As a young lad, Lars’s earliest memories were of his father’s condemnation of the “papists,” as he called all Catholics, and of his father’s vitriolic hatred of the “ignorant Spaniard,” also a Catholic, who had, as a deckhand on the Jenny Tollefsen where Wolf served as first mate, caused the accident that resulted in the loss of Wolf’s leg.

  Nurtured in such a parochial environment, Lars Hansen easily formed the opinion that Catholics were “the spawn of the devil.” When Lars finally took a wife and began his own family, the tradition continued. The new Mrs. Hansen lacked the will to oppose her husband in any matter, and so acquiesced in every instance to her husband’s wishes. It would never have occurred to Lars that it should be any other way.

  By April of 1895, the business and family residence sold, the Hansens found themselves at the last stop before the great leap across the ocean toward what Lars had begun calling “their destiny.” Ensconced aboard the Antioch, Lars and Sofie Hansen had the main cabin; Anders, the oldest child at twenty, a small cabin to himself; and Katrina, together with her two younger sisters, shared a room with two double-tiered bunks, one of which was used to house the younger girl’s large collection of dolls.

  In later years, during the height of upper-class travel in the early twentieth century, such accommodations as the Hansens had would come to be designated “POSH,” referring to the “Port Out, Starboard Home” placement of the cabins, which allowed the wealthy occupants to be on the equatorial or sunny side of the ship during both passages. The Hansens, however, on a one-way voyage to their new life, required only the port side.

  On this last day before sailing on the Antioch, Katrina and her brother had gone ashore to stretch their legs and explore the quay in search of diversion before the long trip to America.

  Through either coincidence or destiny, Tom Callahan and Katrina Hansen had been brought face to face. Each was seeking in their own way to throw off the yoke of a domineering father, and both were on the brink of a great change in his and her lives. The brief, early-morning encounter on the docks of Queenstown had greater import than either could have known. Two young people had cast their lot to the winds and were about to embark on life’s voyage, ignorant of the part each would soon play and the impact each would have in the life of the other.

  Walking the length of the quay, as he had done most evenings since his arrival in Queenstown, Tom found himself in a melancholy mood as he contemplated his last night in Ireland. His week in Cork and Queenstown had been spent working at odd jobs and trying to conserve his meager funds. For entertainment, he had only indulged himself in a nightly pint or two of beer. Though he enjoyed a brew, he had imposed on himself a limit to how much he drank. As a boy and young man, he had seen too much of a truculent father
who routinely stumbled home after the pubs had closed, demanding that his wife reheat his dinner and attend to his other needs, and becoming physically abusive when she took too long to be about it. Tom’s older brother had stepped in one night to prevent their father from assaulting the frightened woman and absorbed a fearful beating for his trouble—an event that provided the impetus for the older boy to leave home forever. Tom, who was thirteen at the time, had weathered his share of heavy blows and over the years had been conditioned to never interfere when his father came home inebriated.

  At sunset, on what was to be his last evening in Ireland, Tom stood at the end of the quay, watching the clouds on the horizon turn from pale pink to gray and thinking of his home. He loved his mother, and during the times when his father wasn’t drunk, their home had been pleasant enough—especially when he was young. Memories of happy times spent in the village and the cottage where he had been raised flooded his mind and evoked a wave of nostalgia. He thought of the mournful Irish songs his mother had often sung to him when he was a lad, and the memory created an ache in his chest, the likes of which he had not experienced. His favorite time when he was a boy had been this very time of day—evening, after supper, when the lamps were lit in the cottage and a fire glowed in the hearth. To think of never seeing that again filled him with a sense of loss he would not have been able to describe.

  As the sun dropped into the sea, beyond the horizon, the evening stars began blinking through the occasional break in the gathering cloud cover. The tide was out, releasing the pungent odor of the sea, and Tom watched as birds swooped in during the last light of day to feed off the exposed floor of the bay.