The 42nd Parallel (3 page)

Fainy would walk along with his knees quaking, the medicine bottle in its white paper tight in one mittened hand. At the corner of Quince was a group of boys he’d have to pass. Passing wasn’t so bad; it was when he was about twenty yards from them that the first snowball would hum by his ear. There was no comeback. If he broke into a run, they’d chase him. If he dropped the medicine bottle he’d be beaten up when he got home. A soft one would plunk on the back of his head and the snow began to trickle down his neck. When he was a half a block from the bridge he’d take a chance and run for it.

“Scared cat . . . Shanty Irish . . . Bowlegged Murphy . . . Running home to tell the cop” . . . would yell the Polak and Bohunk kids between snowballs. They made their snowballs hard by pouring water on them and leaving them to freeze overnight; if one of those hit him it drew blood.

The backyard was the only place you could really feel safe to play in. There were brokendown fences, dented garbage cans, old pots and pans too nearly sieves to mend, a vacant chickencoop that still had feathers and droppings on the floor, hogweed in summer, mud in winter; but the glory of the McCrearys’ backyard was Tony Harriman’s rabbit hutch, where he kept Belgian hares. Tony Harriman was a consumptive and lived with his mother on the ground floor left. He wanted to raise all sorts of other small animals too, raccoons, otter, even silver fox, he’d get rich that way. The day he died nobody could find the key to the big padlock on the door of the rabbit hutch. Fainy fed the hares for several days by pushing in cabbage and lettuce leaves through the double thickness of chickenwire. Then came a week of sleet and rain when he didn’t go out in the yard. The first fine day, when he went to look, one of the hares was dead. Fainy turned white; he tried to tell himself the hare was asleep, but it lay gawkily stiff, not asleep. The other hares were huddled in a corner looking about with twitching noses, their big ears flopping helpless over their backs. Poor hares; Fainy wanted to cry. He ran upstairs to his mother’s kitchen, ducked under the ironing board and got the hammer out of the drawer in the kitchen table. The first time he tried he mashed his finger, but the second time he managed to jump the padlock. Inside the cage there was a funny, sour smell. Fainy picked the dead hare up by its ears. Its soft white belly was beginning to puff up, one dead eye was scaringly open. Something suddenly got hold of Fainy and made him drop the hare in the nearest garbage can and run upstairs. Still cold and trembling, he tiptoed out onto the back porch and looked down. Breathlessly he watched the other hares. By cautious hops they were getting near the door of the hutch into the yard. One of them was out. It sat up on its hind legs, limp ears suddenly stiff. Mom called him to bring her a flatiron from the stove. When he got back to the porch the hares were all gone.

That winter there was a strike in the Chadwick Mills and Pop lost his job. He would sit all day in the front room smoking and cursing:

“Ablebodied man by Jesus, if I couldn’t lick any one of those damn Polaks with my crutch tied behind my back . . . I says so to Mr. Barry; I ain’t goin’ to join no strike. Mr. Barry, a sensible quiet man, a bit of an invalid, with a wife an’ kiddies to think for. Eight years I’ve been watchman, an’ now you give me the sack to take on a bunch of thugs from a detective agency. The dirty pugnosed son of a bitch.”

“If those damn lousy furreners hadn’t a walked out,” somebody would answer soothingly.

The strike was not popular on Orchard Street. It meant that Mom had to work harder and harder, doing bigger and bigger boilersful of wash, and that Fainy and his older sister Milly had to help when they came home from school. And then one day Mom got sick and had to go back to bed instead of starting in on the ironing, and lay with her round white creased face whiter than the pillow and her watercreased hands in a knot under her chin. The doctor came and the district nurse, and all three rooms of the flat smelt of doctors and nurses and drugs, and the only place Fainy and Milly could find to sit was on the stairs. There they sat and cried quietly together. Then Mom’s face on the pillow shrank into a little creased white thing like a rumpled up handkerchief and they said that she was dead and took her away.

The funeral was from the undertaking parlors on Riverside Avenue on the next block. Fainy felt very proud and important because everybody kissed him and patted his head and said he was behaving like a little man. He had a new black suit on, too, like a grownup suit with pockets and everything, except that it had short pants. There were all sorts of people at the undertaking parlors he had never been close to before, Mr. Russell, the butcher and Father O’Donnell and Uncle Tim O’Hara who’d come on from Chicago, and it smelt of whisky and beer like at Finley’s. Uncle Tim was a skinny man with a knobbed red face and blurry blue eyes. He wore a loose black silk tie that worried Fainy, and kept leaning down suddenly, bending from the waist as if he was going to close up like a jackknife, and whispering in a thick voice in Fainy’s ear.

“Don’t you mind ’em, old sport, they’re a bunch o’ bums and hypocrytes, stewed to the ears most of ’em already. Look at Father O’Donnell the fat swine already figurin’ up the burial fees. But don’t you mind ’em remember you’re an O’Hara on your mother’s side. I don’t mind ’em, old sport, and she was my own sister by birth and blood.”

When they got home he was terribly sleepy and his feet were cold and wet. Nobody paid any attention to him. He sat whimpering on the edge of the bed in the dark. In the front room there were voices and a sound of knives and forks, but he didn’t dare go in there. He curled up against the wall and went to sleep. Light in his eyes woke him up. Uncle Tim and Pop were standing over him talking loud. They looked funny and didn’t seem to be standing very steady. Uncle Tim held the lamp.

“Well, Fainy, old sport,” said Uncle Tim giving the lamp a perilous wave over Fainy’s head. “Fenian O’Hara McCreary, sit up and take notice and tell us what you think of our proposed removal to the great and growing city of Chicago. Middletown’s a terrible bitch of a dump if you ask me . . . Meanin’ no offense, John . . . But Chicago . . . Jesus God, man, when you get there you’ll think you’ve been dead and nailed up in a coffin all these years.”

Fainy was scared. He drew his knees up to his chin and looked tremblingly at the two big swaying figures of men lit by the swaying lamp. He tried to speak but the words dried up on his lips.

“The kid’s asleep, Tim, for all your speechifyin’. . . Take your clothes off, Fainy, and get into bed and get a good night’s sleep. We’re leavin’ in the mornin’.”

And late on a rainy morning, without any breakfast, with a big old swelltop trunk tied up with rope joggling perilously on the roof of the cab that Fainy had been sent to order from Hodgeson’s Livery Stable, they set out. Milly was crying. Pop didn’t say a word but sucked on an unlit pipe. Uncle Tim handled everything, making little jokes all the time that nobody laughed at, pulling a roll of bills out of his pocket at every juncture, or taking great gurgling sips out of the flask he had in his pocket. Milly cried and cried. Fainy looked out with big dry eyes at the familiar streets, all suddenly odd and lopsided, that rolled past the cab; the red bridge, the scabshingled houses where the Polaks lived, Smith’s and Smith’s corner drugstore . . . there was Billy Hogan just coming out with a package of chewing gum in his hand. Playing hookey again. Fainy had an impulse to yell at him, but something froze it . . . Main with its elms and street cars, blocks of stores round the corner of Church, and then the fire department. Fainy looked for the last time into the dark cave where shone entrancingly the brass and copper curves of the engine, then past the cardboard fronts of the First Congregational Church, The Carmel Baptist Church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church built of brick and set catercornered on its lot instead of straight with a stern face to the street like the other churches, then the three castiron stags on the lawn in front of the Commercial House, and the residences, each with its lawn, each with its scrollsaw porch, each with its hydrangea bush. Then the houses got smaller, and the lawns disappeared; the cab trundled round past Simpson’s Grain and Feed Warehouse, along a row of barbershops, saloons and lunchrooms, and they were all getting out at the station.

At the station lunchcounter Uncle Tim set everybody up to breakfast. He dried Milly’s tears and blew Fainy’s nose in a big new pockethandkerchief that still had the tag on the corner and set them to work on bacon and eggs and coffee. Fainy hadn’t had coffee before, so the idea of sitting up like a man and drinking coffee made him feel pretty good. Milly didn’t like hers, said it was bitter. They were left all alone in the lunchroom for some time with the empty plates and empty coffee cups under the beady eyes of a woman with the long neck and pointed face of a hen who looked at them disapprovingly from behind the counter. Then with an enormous, shattering rumble, sludgepuff sludge . . . puff, the train came into the station. They were scooped up and dragged across the platform and through a pipesmoky car and before they knew it the train was moving and the wintry russet Connecticut landscape was clattering by.

we hurry wallowing like in a boat in the musty stably-smelling herdic cab      He kept saying What would you do Lucy if I were to invite one of them to my table? They’re very lovely people Lucy the colored people and He had cloves in a little silver box and a rye whisky smell on his breath hurrying to catch the cars to New York

and She was saying Oh dolly I hope we wont be late and Scott was waiting with the tickets and we had to run up the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and all the little cannons kept falling out of the Olympia and everybody stooped to pick them up and the conductor Allaboard lady quick lady

they were little brass cannons and were bright in the sun on the platform of the Seventh Street Depot and Scott hoisted us all up and the train was moving and the engine bell was ringing and Scott put in your hand a little handful of brass tiny cannons just big enough to hold the smallest size red firecracker at the battle of Manila Bay and said Here’s the artillery Jack

and He was holding forth in the parlor car Why Lucy if it were necessary for the cause of humanity I would walk out and be shot any day you would Jack wouldn’t you? wouldn’t you porter? who was bringing appolinaris and He had a flask in the brown grip where the silk initialed handkerchiefs always smelt of bay rum

and when we got to Havre de Grace He said Remember Lucy we used to have to ferry across the Susquehanna before the bridge was built

and across Gunpowder Creek too

Russet hills, patches of woods, farmhouses, cows, a red colt kicking up its heels in a pasture, rail fences, streaks of marsh.

“Well, Tim, I feel like a whipped cur . . . So long as I’ve lived, Tim, I’ve tried to do the right thing,” Pop kept repeating in a rattling voice. “And now what can they be asayin’ about me?”

“Jesus God, man, there was nothin’ else you could do, was there? What the devil can you do if you haven’t any money and haven’t any job and a lot o’ doctors and undertakers and landlords come round with their bills and you with two children to support?”

“But I’ve been a quiet and respectable man, steady and misfortunate ever since I married and settled down. And now what’ll they be thinkin’ of me sneakin’ out like a whipped cur?”

“John, take it from me that I’d be the last one to want to bring disrespect on the dead that was my own sister by birth and blood . . . But it ain’t your fault and it ain’t my fault . . . it’s the fault of poverty, and poverty’s the fault of the system . . . Fenian, you listen to Tim O’Hara for a minute and Milly you listen too, cause a girl ought to know these things just as well as a man and for once in his life Tim O’Hara’s tellin’ the truth . . . It’s the fault of the system that don’t give a man the fruit of his labor . . . The only man that gets anything out of capitalism is a crook, an’ he gets to be a millionaire in short order . . . But an honest workin’ man like John or myself we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to bury us decent with.”

Smoke rolled white in front of the window shaking out of its folds trees and telegraph poles and little square shingle-roofed houses and towns and trolleycars, and long rows of buggies with steaming horses standing in line.

“And who gets the fruit of our labor, the goddam business men, agents, middlemen who never did a productive piece of work in their life.”

Fainy’s eyes are following the telegraph wires that sag and soar.

“Now, Chicago ain’t no paradise, I can promise you that, John, but it’s a better market for a workin’ man’s muscle and brains at present than the East is . . . And why, did you ask me why . . . ? Supply and demand, they need workers in Chicago.”

“Tim, I tellyer I feel like a whipped cur.”

“It’s the system, John, it’s the goddam lousy system.”

A great bustle in the car woke Fainy up. It was dark. Milly was crying again. He didn’t know where he was.

“Well, gentlemen,” Uncle Tim was saying, “we’re about to arrive in little old New York.”

In the station it was light; that surprised Fainy, who thought it was already night. He and Milly were left a long time sitting on a suitcase in the waitingroom. The waitingroom was huge, full of unfamiliarlooking people, scary like people in picture-books. Milly kept crying.

“Hey, Milly, I’ll biff you one if you don’t stop crying.”

“Why?” whined Milly, crying all the more.

Fainy stood as far away from her as possible so that people wouldn’t think they were together. When he was about ready to cry himself Pop and Uncle Tim came and took them and the suitcase into the restaurant. A strong smell of fresh whisky came from their breaths, and they seemed very bright around the eyes. They all sat at a table with a white cloth and a sympathetic colored man in a white coat handed them a large card full of printing.

“Let’s eat a good supper,” said Uncle Tim, “if it’s the last thing we do on this earth.”

“Damn the expense,” said Pop, “it’s the system that’s to blame.”