The Banished Children of Eve (76 page)

“O God, Jimmy,” Margaret said, “it's been like a nightmare since yesterday morning, when Mr. Bedford left for
Long Branch. Seemed just a normal day till the grocer came with his delivery and told us to stay inside and lock the doors. Said there was a riot started uptown over the draft, but we hardly gave it a thought till Mr. Ward come back from visiting a picture gallery and his clothes is all ripped and there's blood on his face and he tells us he's lucky to be alive, that he was set upon by a gang of thugs who thought he was Horace Greeley. Poor man has been in the most fearful upset ever since, and then this morning these people begin showing up right outside the house cursing Horace Greeley and screaming for him to come out. The neighbors summoned the police, and a force of them appeared, and it seemed everything was going to be all right when suddenly there's a fearful noise, like wild Indians is on the loose, and the next thing the police is scattered and defeated and running for their lives.”

“You've all got to get out of this house,” Dunne said.

“I'm not movin',” the cook said.

“Where's Ward?”

“Upstairs, in his room,” Margaret said.

“You two go out the back, over the fence to the neighbors. I'll bring the old man down and follow in a minute.” Dunne eyed the door to the library. Would have the safe opened in no time. See if Bedford had taken it all to Long Branch or wherever he was gone to.

“It's not only Mr. Ward,” Margaret said. “There's someone else. He's badly hurt.” She led Dunne through the dining room and the pantry down into the cellar, to a storage room next to the kitchen. Lying on the floor was a man wrapped in a blanket, with a pillow beneath his head. Margaret knelt beside him and gently pulled back the blanket. The man wore the uniform of a Metropolitan. It was torn and tattered. His face was badly bruised, his nose crushed.

“We found him neath the stoop,” Margaret said. “He'd been given a terrible beating.”

“Bloody animals was searchin' for him like hungry dogs,” the cook said.

“He's safe here,” Dunne said. “Now go. I'll bring down the old man.”

Margaret stood. In a slow, deliberate way she
said, “If this man stays, so do I.”

“Aye,” the cook said. “We'll stay together and defend this house!”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Dunne said, “help me move him.”

The Metropolitan was a large man, and they had trouble lifting him. Dunne brought a chair from the kitchen, and they propped him up in it. Despite the battered condition of the face, Dunne was sure he recognized him. Dunne stood him up and threw him over his shoulder, staggering under the weight. Now he remembered: last April, during the trouble on the docks. Sergeant O'Donnell, the strutting leader of the Metropolitans, who promised him a taste of the locust stick if they ever met again.

“Get the door,” he said to the cook.

“I'll go keep a watch on Mr. Ward,” Margaret said, and ran out before anyone could say a word.

Dunne went to the back fence and dropped O'Donnell beside it.

“In the name of Jesus, be more gentle with him,” the cook said.

“Climb over to the other side,” Dunne said.

She stood for a moment, and looked at him. “Don't you touch a thing in that house, do you hear!”

He formed his hands into a stirrup. “I'll give you a boost,” he said. She put her foot in his hands and went over with ease. He shouldered the policeman again and lifted him to the top of the fence. Some neighbors ran out and helped the cook lower him down.

Dunne dropped back to the ground, went through the kitchen and back upstairs. Outside the mob was chanting the name of Horace Greeley. He went straight into the library. The Federal Certified All-Security Safe was in the corner. He took the claw out of the inner pocket of his pants. He put his ear on the door and listened to the tumbler.
Trick was to get within a few numbers, slip the claw in, and pry.

Margaret was calling from above, “Jimmy, are you there? Is that you, Jimmy?”

A brick crashed through the front window, followed by a barrage that tore the curtains from their rods. The whole house echoed with a rhythmic pounding and the front door tore from its hinges and crashed to the floor. Dunne gave the safe one last try. It didn't budge. He bolted up the stairs. She was peering over the banister, her hair hanging over her shoulders. She took him by the hand down the hall to a bedroom in the rear. A plump old white-haired man with a bandaged face lay on the bed. His eyes were open, but he seemed stunned and senseless.

“I can't get him to move,” Margaret said.

Dunne heaved him over his shoulder. After O'Donnell, the old man seemed as light as a child. “How do we get to the roof?”

“There's a ladder beside my bedroom door.”

They ran to the top floor. A ladder attached to the wall led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Dunne adjusted the load on his shoulder and took out his revolver. He handed it to her. “Go up and keep us covered. Anyone comes in the way, use it on them.”

She climbed up, opened the trapdoor, and disappeared onto the roof. Her face peeked over the edge. “It's all clear,” she said.

Dunne climbed up, holding tight to the old man. He reached the top, and Margaret helped pull the old man onto the roof. Dunne was about to climb out himself when someone grabbed his legs and pulled so hard he almost fell backward. He held on to the ladder and kicked. For an instant he was free. He heaved himself up, then his legs were snared again. He kicked again, but this time he couldn't break loose. He felt the sharp, hot pain of someone biting into his calf. Margaret grasped Dunne under the shoulders.

“Use the gun!” he yelled.

She took it from her waistband and held it in her hands, staring at it.

The biting stopped, but the weight
around his legs was loosening his grip. “Use the Goddamn gun!”

She pointed it over his shoulder, down into the darkness, looked away, and pulled the trigger. It thundered in Dunne's ears. The drag on his legs disappeared. He climbed out and resettled the old man on his shoulder. They ran across to the roof of the next building. Dunne rested the old man against the chimney. Margaret handed him the gun. She was shaking.

“I'll be back in a minute,” he said.

He ran to the ledge. Down below, the street was filled with people exiting the house with rugs, clothing, lamps, bedding, furniture. A fire had been lit, and they tossed on it whatever they didn't want: a piano, books, portraits of men in white wigs. Four men came out with the safe and pushed it down the stairs. They worked on it with a sledgehammer and crowbar, broke it open, and stood back. Dunne could see that it was empty.

“Y
OU'VE NOTHIN' TO FEAR,
” Cassidy said. “The rich man and the nigger should be worried, not the likes of you.”

Mike Manning mumbled something neither Cassidy nor McSweeney could hear.

“How's that, Mike?” Cassidy said.

Manning stood with his face by the corner of the shade that was drawn over the front window. He squinted from the slanted, unsparing sunlight. He walked back and sat beside Cassidy and McSweeney, his only customers, folded his arms, and set down his head. Had been like this for the whole time McSweeney and Cassidy were with him, well over an hour. They had banged on the window for ten minutes before he appeared.

“Maybe he's not there,” McSweeney had said.

“And maybe the Pope's not in Rome,” Cassidy had said, and kept knocking.

Eventually the shade had parted a crack. Seeing who
it was, Manning had let them in but hardly spoke a word; he had poured them drinks and stayed by the window, his skinball face half hidden in the shade.

Cassidy patted Manning on the back. “If you'd like, we'll help you board the window up.”

Manning raised his head. “Little good it'll do when the scum decides the time has come.”

“You've got a right to your opinion,” Cassidy said. “But I tell you, Mike, it'd go better if you opened the place. The police has given the order to close up? So what? Little chance of seeing a Metropolitan in this vicinity today! But the people will wonder why your door is shut. Person could put the wrong meaning on it.”

“The people?” Manning said. “The people is nothin' but envious, jealous scum. Knock a man's head off, if he tries to raise it. A tribe of begrudgers. Bloody begrudgers. Forgive one of their own anything save success. That they never forgive.”

“Words like that won't help,” Cassidy said.

Manning shrugged. He went back to the window. Cassidy suggested to McSweeney they go someplace livelier where they might hear what was happening in the city, whether today would prove a worthy successor to yesterday. They said good-bye to Manning, who said nothing in return as he locked the door behind them. They walked up Catherine Street. On the north side of the street, the Brooks Brothers store was closed and shuttered. They stopped at Shugrue's Ale House, at the corner of Henry Street, which was packed with patrons enjoying the free drink. They were told that the battle was on again, especially in the Eighteenth Ward, on the East Side, and that on the West Side the crowds had taken control of the ferries. If the government was planning to send reinforcements, it would have to find another route.

McSweeney excused himself and went out back to the privy. His bowels were acting up again. A terrible ordeal. Started yesterday, when he awoke sweating, head throbbing with pain, mouth so dry it was hard to swallow. Felt
as if he might foul the bedding and stood to go outside, but he knew instantly he would never make it that far, end up shitting his pants, so he squatted over the pail he kept in the corner for his night piss, felt the stream of liquid pour out, heard the dull, ugly sound when it hit the metal bottom.

“Jesus,” his niece had said when he lit the stove to boil water, “do you want to kill us with the heat?

“My insides is acting up,” he had said. “Tea is the only thing will quiet them.”

“It's the drink that disturbs them in the first place. Mind what you put in one end, you won't be so bothered by what comes out the other.”

His niece sat at the table doing her seamstress work. He drank his tea in silence. Lucky she was to have a tenant in the reeking basement of her Pitt Street hovel. Been there since he was let go from the shoe factory in '57, and if she showed him kindness in giving him a place to stay, he had never missed the rent, not once in all those years, doing whatever it took to see she was paid, cleaning up saloons, sweeping chimneys, running messages, and all she could do in gratitude was complain about a fire small enough to make a pot of tea. He returned to bed and spent the day.

The racket made by his niece's boys was what woke him up, their singing and shouting. They and their friends had come home loaded down with loot: scarves, belts, shoes, even a box full of dishes. His niece told them to get it all out of the house, said it was sinful thievery and she would have none of it under her roof. The boys laughed and started to pass around their spoils to the neighbors who gathered in the kitchen. The boys gave McSweeney some of the porter they had brought with them, and he drank it while listening to their accounts of the day's events.

The tea and rest and porter had restored him. Cassidy had stopped by in the morning to see how he was, gave his own extended and embellished account of what had occurred the day before, and suggested a visit to Mike Manning's.

Shugrue's was a far happier, convivial
place, and when McSweeney finished his business in the privy and reentered, he found Cassidy entertaining a circle of longshoremen with his account of Monday's battles. “Mark my words,” Cassidy said, “these days will never be forgotten by the people of New York. A hundred years hence our descendants will celebrate the time the Irish led the resistance to the draft!”

By the middle of the afternoon, Shugrue's was filled with reports of the renewed fighting on Second Avenue, the inhabitants of the Gas House District battling the Metropolitans and the Army. “Better to die here,” someone said, “fightin' for your rights as an American, than down in Virginia, fightin' for the nigger.” A sizable number of people left with the announced intent to join the battle, although Cassidy whispered to McSweeney that from the look of them he doubted they would make it past the next groggery.

Cassidy went on talking, and after a while McSweeney stopped listening. His mind went back to the same place and time it always did when the liquor took effect, the time of his youth in the rock-strewn field outside Spiddal, when he lay in the high grass, the time after the potatoes were dug and there were milk and butter and salt to eat them with, the time when the great rainless clouds swept in from the Atlantic, so close and so white that he imagined he could run up a hillside and jump on one, turn it around, and ride all the way to America, the time long ago before his teeth fell out and his bowels went sour, before the years of toil in that factory and the years on the docks, before the weeks of hell in the hold of a coffin ship, his wife dying at sea, before the eviction from the estate of Lord Kirwin and the blight descending on the fields like the judgment of God and the women keening over the rotted praties as though they were the carcasses of dead children.

Cassidy and McSweeney drank in Shugrue's all day and into the night, and it wasn't until word went around that three policemen in mufti had been caught trying to slip into the Brooks Brothers store that the place emptied out. Catherine Street was mobbed. McSweeney felt himself pulled along as
the crowd moved south toward Cherry. Some boys ripped up cobblestones from the street and hurled them through the window of a plumber's shop. They rushed inside and came out with pipes and wrenches, which they handed around. Windows were suddenly shattered up and down the street, and the boys led a charge against Brooks Brothers, prying open the shutters and hammering down the front door.