Paradise Alley (65 page)

They felt more or less sheltered, at least, in the narrow streets of the town, though a few rebel shells were already whizzing over their heads. Tom saw one land in their ranks, a few hundred yards ahead. It blew ten or twelve men up in the air, and he ducked down instinctively. So did every man around him, but he felt humiliated anyway—resolving
to stay up, to not so much as flinch when the next shell hit. Yet when it did he ducked again, nearly dropping to his knees this time.

“Hold your line! Hold your line!” the officers bellowed.

They marched on out into the bare, trampled fields beyond the town, and the whole battle opened up before them. It was a spectacle so vast and grand that Tom lost all sense of equilibrium watching it, and would have fallen had not Snatchem grabbed his arm.

The top of the heights they had to take was already obscured by white smoke. The noise deafening, the ground shaking beneath their feet from the cannonade. But there, before them, they could see rank after endless rank of the men in their thick blue overcoats. All of them marching grimly toward the bluffs, moving with the utmost solemn precision and determination, and watching them, Tom was certain that they could not fail.

His regiment halted at the edge of town, to await their turn in the assault, and load the heavy Enfield .69s they had still used then. All those hours of drill coming into practice. Tom, moving solely by rote, tearing off the paper head of the cartridge, stuffing it down the barrel, placing the firing cap on the nipple under the hammer. Doing it all as naturally as breathing, an exercise he could not possibly have performed in any other way by then, in that place.

Then they were moving again—double-time now, across the open ground and toward the rebel positions. The advance suddenly bolting forward at last—

Yet almost as soon as they did, it went wrong. Right away they had to pull up at some sort of canal—a straight ditch, thirty feet long and six feet deep. The only way across it was over three small bridges, but their planks had all been removed, leaving them to inch their way over on the stringers.

“Sweet!” Snatchem shouted beside him. The officers themselves swearing bitterly about the scouting, the men trying to hurry across as best they could, the veterans sure of what was coming next.

Within minutes the reb guns had begun to range in on them, still straddled over the canal. The shells and cannonballs tearing freely through their ranks now, the men moving frantically, yelling, “
Hi! Hi! Hi!
” as they swung themselves over. Some of them even preferring to jump down into the icy water, to try to climb on up the other side. Running on past the dead and wounded men who littered the field before them.

Once they were finally across the canal, Tom and the others from the Black Joke ran up to a small hillock, which at least gave them a little shelter from the guns. Pausing there, as they reformed and gathered themselves—not four hundred yards from the reb lines now.

“Still drawin' us,” Black Dan Conaway muttered next to Tom as they waited for the order. “Still drawin' us in!”

“Now, men!”

They leaped up over the top of the little hill, running full out toward the guns above them. It was only then that they spotted the sunken road, the stone wall and the entrenchments thrown up across the crest of the heights. The grey and butternut figures crowded behind it.

“Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus!” Snatchem was chanting beside him. “Oh, Jesus, so that was it!”

The rifles along the stone wall flashed as if a match had been struck along the whole length of the line. Every blue-coated soldier Tom could see ahead of him went down at once, as if they had fallen into a ditch. He ducked his head involuntarily, and saw the ground beneath his feet moving, as if it were alive, and teeming with insects. Realizing only later that what he was seeing was a hundred more reb balls and bullets, ripping through the mud and the sparse grass.

“
I knew it! I knew it!
” Black Dan was yelling, just to his right—shaking his head, but with an expression almost of pleasure on his face. He pushed on a little ways more, then suddenly spun around—blood from the hole in the middle of his forehead spewing out over Tom and George Leese before he dropped.

Tom took a step back—and something that felt like a great wind picked him up and pitched him over on his side, tearing the knapsack right off his back. He struggled back to his feet, feeling over himself but finding no wound, only Dan's blood upon him. Staring dully at the small crater the shell had dug into the ground behind him—

“Get back, get back!”

Snatchem was pulling at his elbow then, tugging him back behind the small hill they had advanced from before. Tom realizing that they had not advanced more than a hundred yards or so—the ground they had just covered now a writhing mass of blue-clad bodies.

“
Sixty-ninth, New York!
Up, men, up! Show 'em what you're made of!”

They ran out again. Tom had lost his gun when the shell hit, but he stooped and picked up another Enfield lying on the field a few feet out
from the hillock. There were plenty of them to be had now. The same storm of concentrated reb fire smashing into them again, men dropping all around him.

“Lie down, men! Lie down and fire!” an officer was yelling, and they did as they were told. Tom threw himself down into the mud, operating by rote again—loading and firing as he had been drilled, as if he were become a machine. They were able to get off a ragged volley, enough to keep some of the rebs down, and get back to the cover of the little rise again. Snatchem panting with exhaustion beside him—the two of them looking at each other with something like wonder.

“Jesus. Jesus,” was all George could say.

“Up, men, up!”

The officers stringing increasingly meaningless, inchoate words together, exhortations and threats, and any appeals to what they were supposed to be.

“For the Union, men. For your wives an' sweethearts!
Sixty-ninth!
”

“For New York, men!
For Ireland!
”

Tom did not know how they could go out there again—but one man did and then another, and then it was Feeley, and he and George were running after him.

They got farther, this time, until they were no less than forty yards from the stone wall, and the sunken road. There was a sudden lull in the firing, when Tom, still running forward, could hear only the sound of his own breath, the screams of the wounded men on the ground. Some of the smoke blew off—and he could see the next firing line already drawn up and reloaded, waiting for them. So close, now, that they could hear the rebels' taunts as they came.

“C'mon, blue belly!”

“Bring them boots an' blankets, now! Bring 'em here, blue bellies!”

Their voices not quite the usual slow drawl they heard from the rebs, but something more familiar.

“Oh, Christ,” Snatchem breathed beside him. “They're Irish!”

The reb line burst into flame again. Tom saw a color sergeant, just ahead of him, to the right, take a ball that shattered his leg. The man stayed up on his knees somehow, waving the flag at the rebs. He was hit by at least five more bullets in rapid succession—another sergeant
grabbing the flag as he went down—falling under still another swarm of bullets himself.

Yet somehow, they were there. The regiment, still making its way up to the wall. Every man in the ranks now, right down to the drummer boys, shouting at the top of their lungs against the insuperable noise of the battle.

“Fire!”

Tom brought his Enfield up, stopped, and squeezed off a shot. The men all around him stopped to fire as well, their bullets tearing through the stone wall and the entrenchments. The first line of rebels falling back, going down.

But then they were done. Another line of the butternut uniforms had already moved up, raising their rifles. Their volley shattered the point of the charge, stopping them in their tracks. Men were going down everywhere around Tom, as if struck by a great wind, and the next thing he knew they were running for their lives again. Tripping over bodies, falling into the mud and scrambling up again, crawling back toward the hillock.

“Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus!”

They had made six charges in all before the early winter darkness covered the fields. It would become the stuff of legend. He would hear teenage boys talk about it in awe, because of what they had read in the
Herald,
or the
Irish News.
Yet at no time did they get within a hundred yards of the stone wall, and the sunken road again.

Tom had been hit on the last charge. Still moving toward the wall that he had seen all day, like a recurring dream, whenever the smoke had cleared. Then the reb ball had passed through the left side of his body and on out his back, and he fell flat on his face. He tried to get up at once, but his legs buckled beneath him and he fell back down, completely helpless, unable even to crawl back behind the hillock now. Watching from the ground as the last charge crumbled around him, and his friends and comrades ran back past him, trying to save their own lives.

•
61
•

He had lain out on the frozen mud for a day and two nights before the armies had finally concluded a truce and sent out the stretcher details. He was able to stanch the wounds with the folds of his overcoat, at least—the hole in his chest no bigger than a nickel, though the exit wound in his back was large enough to swallow his fist. He managed to steal a blanket, and a canteen of water from the dead men around him, though he was afraid to move even that much—even at night—for fear of the body robbers, or the bored reb sharpshooters, firing randomly into the bodies still on the field.

He listened to the sound of their shots, thudding into corpses all around him, and wondering when one would hit him. The ceaseless moaning and pleading of the other wounded men tearing at him—yet diminishing steadily as the hours went by. The bodies of the dead swelling up, their eyes bulging and their skin blackening as they rotted.

By the second night he was racked with fever, and all but delirious. Still lying on his chest, staring up with the one eye he could turn freely to the heavens. There, spectacular, glowing, red and blue streaks of color began to appear, spreading out across the entire night sky as he watched. Tom assumed that they were due to the fact that he was delirious, but still he watched them in awe. His mind wandering back to the night of his greatest triumph with the Black Joke—the night he
had found the fire, and saved the butt, and first proved himself to be a full-fledged member of the company.
The night they had washed the Big Six.

It had been a night much the same as this one, in the deep of winter. The week between Christmas and the New Year, when the City was at its darkest and most mysterious. The sky full of luminous orange clouds, a high, crisp layer of snow covering the streets.

Tom had been nearly alone in the firehouse. A couple of older men were half-dozing around the big Franklin stove in the common room, hiding out from their wives. A few more bachelors upstairs, sleeping it off, everyone else with their families for the rounds of parties and suppers that ushered in the new year. He would have liked to have been with Deirdre, and Liza, and the new baby, but he didn't mind too much. Happy to have the chance to prove himself, even glad to be out of the house for a night, if only to sit around the stove and faithfully read one of Deirdre's inspirational tracts, and try to stay awake.

Then he had heard the alarm bell—distant but distinct, through the uncommon stillness of the City. It was past vespers, he knew, and it could be nothing else. Ringing twice, then stopping—then twice again.
A fire in the ward.

He was on his feet at once. The older men rising reluctantly—but Tom was already in his boots and red shirt. All he had to do was pull down his coat from the wall and he was out in the street. The night air instantly cold and bracing, sweeping away the cobwebs in his brain, the drowsiness from the stove.

He had squinted toward the tower of the Tombs prison, a pointed shaft of darkness within the dark.
There—
he could just make it out. A single lantern was being shimmied out at the end of a long stick. He could picture the runners from half a dozen other companies, already off and running, but he forced himself to wait—and sure enough, another light appeared. A second yellow lantern, swaying and dancing along the signal pole.

Then he was off, his boots crunching through the snow, moving toward the river. The two lanterns meant the waterfront—but where? When there were other runners at the station house they would split up and look, but tonight the responsibility was his alone.
To find the fire, find the closest Croton hydrant and hold it for the company—

He stopped at the end of Catherine Street. Sniffing the cold air, trying to feel out the fire. Peering into every doorway and alley. He was certain that he could already hear the runners from other companies racing down the snowbound streets behind him, but he forced himself to wait again—knowing that he had to be careful. Any stray
b'hoy
from the river gangs, he knew, would be just as glad to lay him out, and then there were the Old Maid's Boys. A gang of hundreds, men and boys, who liked to set fires just to ambush the volunteers, beating them up and leaving their engines smashed and useless, in the gutter—

He ran out along the docks as quietly as he could. The ships' furled masts covered with ice, jingling quietly as they jostled in their moorings. The forest of bare branches looming white and spectral before him. He ran on down along the waterfront, past where it curved in near James Street—and there was the fire, dead ahead.

It dazzled him at first, a geyser of red light, erupting out of an old tea warehouse. He stood there staring at it. The smell of the burning tea fragrant with chicory, and cinnamon—

Then Tom had spotted the first, other figures, wobbling toward him from the saloons along South and Front Streets.
No time, now, to stand and admire the flames.
He ran desperately up and down the block, trying to find one of the pea-green, wooden Croton hydrants.
That was the whole game—to get there first, find the hydrant for the company.
He had almost given up when he fell over it—halfway down the street, all but covered by the snowdrifts.

But how to hold it against the others before his company arrived?
Across the street he spotted a hard-cider barrel, providentially abandoned in the gutter. He snatched it up, planted it over the hydrant—and sat down upon it. Folding himself into his coat, trying to look as inconspicuous as he possibly could on the deserted street.

Soon he could hear the sound of dozens of running men, and the rumble of the engine wagon rolling and sliding down the street.
The machine!

But there was something wrong. He could tell it right away, just from the sound of the wheels—the wagon much bigger, heavier than the Black Joke's pump. He put it down to the snow at first, but then he heard the trumpet, louder and deeper than theirs. More men running with the machine than the Old Bombazula had ever had—

Another company, it had to be. But who?

Tom was tempted to stand up and look. It sounded like an army now, coming around the corner of Peck Slip. But he made himself stay where he was, on the barrel, guarding and hiding the Croton hydrant. Willing himself to shrink down, to look as inconspicuous as he possibly could.
Dead, perhaps. Frozen where he was, wrapped up in his coat.
Listening to the cheers going up from the boys along the street and the men coming out of the taverns, whole families leaning out the windows of their homes to see the fire. His blood turning colder than it already was, once he could make out what they were shouting:

“Big Six! Big Six!”

It hove into view—the Americus Engine No. 6. The huge, piano doubledecker, with its suction engine and a gooseneck pump.
The Big Six.

He barely dared to lift his eyes up to see it. The Black Joke was a double-decker, too, but there was nothing like the Big Six. It weighed more than two tons—a huge, bold, red machine. Its lanterns glowed like two amber eyes in the darkness, and between its runners was painted the head of a snarling Bengal tiger, looking as real as life now, in the light from the flames.

There were at least seventy-five men pulling the engine along by the handles, or running beside it with military discipline. And directing them from up on the engine box was the foreman, Bill Tweed himself—decked out in his long white foreman's coat, arms crossed over his belly like a great pagan idol.

“It's here, it's got to be here! There's at least one on the street!” he was shouting fiercely. “Where is she? Where's the plug, men?”

It took Tom all the courage he could muster to hold his ground. The Big Six was the most feared fire company in the City. It was made up entirely of enormous, burly men—the only ones who could work the brakes on such a monster. Most of them were over two hundred and fifty pounds, and lightning boys with their fists, plucked from Tweed's old Cherry Street gang. They were also the Black Joke's most hated rival, ever since the Big Six had been awarded their old firehouse, following an unfortunate Christmas Eve incident that had involved the firing of a loaded mortar at another company. Yet they had never quite dared to take them on—

“Get away, get away there, ya old rummie! Is that the hydrant you're sleepin' on, then?”

Discovered.
One of the boys came up to him at last, but Tom made no answer. He could hear another trumpet now—one that sounded very much like the Black Joke's, just around the corner. Sometimes as many as five or six companies might converge on the same fire, and then the fights for the hydrants alone could take hours. Tom had seen whole buildings burn to ashes while the firemen pummeled each other senseless with pistols and knives, iron spanners and slungshots—then go out to a saloon together afterward.

But such a turnout was unlikely, now, in the last week of the year, with half the town off to its balls and parties.
He had to last on his barrel until the lads could get there.
The runner from the Big Six shook him again and he groaned like an old drunk—the boy's face twisting in disgust. He was younger and slighter than Tom, and he knew that he could take him. Instead, he let the boy push him back a little farther, revealing only the grey cider barrel underneath him. The boy saw it, and started to leave—

“There it is! The old drunk's on it, after all!”

He had rocked a little too far back on his barrel—another runner spotting a glimpse of green, racing over toward him. The first boy grabbed for his arm then—and Tom pulled him on forward, hitting him in the face with his other hand. The boy went down in the snow, blood spurting from his nose. The rest of the Big Six runners swarmed him immediately, fighting frantically to push him off the hydrant, but it was too late. The lads came, running the Black Joke down the slip, spotting Tom at once. Before the Americus laddies could move their wagon they had chased the runners off, hooking the butt of their machine up to the hydrant.

Yet they were still outnumbered and outmuscled by the rest of the men from the Big Six. They began to converge on them now, spanners and ax handles in their hands. Tom and the rest of the Black Joke company formed a semicircle around the hydrant, ready to fight for it. The flames licking up out of the warehouse windows across the street—

“We was on the street first! It's our hydrant—”

“The hell you say,” Finn McCool had told them, bustling up at the fore of his company. “We got the hydrant, it's our fire. Or are ya too afraid to lose your maidenhead?”

Only the first engine could hook up to the hydrant. If there were no more hydrants, the later wagons would have to get their water
through
the first one—and that was the whole game, their point of honor. If the second engine could not send the water on just as fast as they got it—or faster—it would build up in their own wagon. Building up until it spilled right out over the box, the greatest disaster any fire company could endure. Washing the whole wagon, and ruining whatever elaborate series of paintings and emblems decorated its sides and front.
An indelible disgrace.

The Big Six was still a virgin. It had never been washed by any engine—and they were all aware that it had washed at least a dozen others in its time. Its big men working the brakes of the huge engine with indomitable ease. Capable of building up such pressure that they had once sent a spout of water sailing right over the Liberty Pole at Franklin Street, during the firemen's Fourth of July rally—a prodigious feat, even if it was later discovered that Tweed had paid a sailor to shimmy up the pole and cut three feet off it during the night.

But they were not about to let them wash the Black Joke, now that they had the hydrant—not even if it meant they had to take a beating for it, or the whole town burned down. Only at the last minute did Tweed come down from his engine box, and step in between his men and theirs. Even Finn McCool looked a little nervous then, in the shadow of the much bigger man, but also no doubt aware of how much he overshadowed him in the Tammany clubhouse. But to everyone's surprise, the big man made a gesture of magnanimity.