I thanked Emmett for all his help, for saving me from God knows what, for being as close as blood. He said I was welcome anytime and he’d keep my things till I wanted them, and then I went off to work on the canal with Masterson for four of the worst months of my life. He beat me like a mutt and refused to pay me wages. I ran off when I saw how to get away clean, and I found work on John the Brawn’s boat for three months till it sank. Then John bought the skiff and we worked the river out of Albany as ferrymen and haulers, water rats who’d go anywhere with anything between Albany, Troy, West Troy, and Greenbush.
One day on our river I saw you step into Carrick’s boat and saw the boat hit by an ice floe. We put out to rescue you, I saved you from drowning, and that’s how we met. My life was used to subtractions, not additions of beauty the likes of yours.
Maud, I send love.
When I reached Schenectady I asked a stagecoach driver for a ride, since I had no money to ride the train. The driver, for helping him load baggage, let me ride on the roof of the coach. I knotted myself in among the baggage tie-down ropes and we bounced away into the wind toward Albany. We came in on the Turnpike, which was rotten with mud, the wagon traffic moving so slowly outside the city that I leaped down and walked. I thought first of my old house, of which I had had no fear when the family took sick. But now the possibility of contamination waiting in it sent me into shivers and I decided to go instead to Emmett Daugherty’s.
I cut across the city’s western plateau and headed northeast in the direction the cattle drovers took when they moved the herds toward the river and swam them across to the Boston and New York trains. Emmett’s house was a cabin, primitive and temporary. He planned to build a proper house once he married, but it was still a cabin in this year, and when I neared it I saw his niece, Josephine Daugherty, feeding chickens in the front yard.
She eyed me oddly until I told her my name, and then she said she was Josie and that she’d heard of me. She was a small redheaded girl of twenty-five with more freckles on her nose and chin than any woman ought to be burdened with. She was a greenhorn, in from Clonmel only a few months, and keeping house for Emmett, who had overcome his lung illness and was again working for old man Fitzgibbon at his Albany ironworks. Josie invited me in for tea, fed me cold chicken and potatoes, and I was glad for it. Her presence clearly meant there was no bed for me in the house, and so I would need money. What arose in memory was the birdcage, so valued by my parents. I remembered our broken spade I’d left with Emmett, and that would be tool enough to dig up the cage.
“Will you sit with us till Emmett comes home from work?” Josie asked me, and I said no, that I had to move along and pick up something I had left behind.
“I’ve got an old spade with a broken handle stored out in your shed with our other stuff,” I said to her. “I have to do a little digging.”
“Are you digging a garden?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then you’re shoveling ashes or some such.”
“No.”
“You won’t say what it is.”
“No.”
“Then you’ll hear no more foolish questions from me,” she said, and abruptly left the room. I was sorry, but it wasn’t any of her business. I went out the back door. I found the spade, took it back to the house and showed it to Josie, and she was all right again. She had a round face and a low forehead, both of which I have associated with nosy people ever since. There was nothing pretty about her and I made a wager with myself she would never marry. She was not smart, like Maud, and Maud was beautiful and the opposite of nosy.
“I’ll be going now,” I said to Josie. “I’ll come back someday and wait for Emmett to come home.”
“You’re very young to be alone on the road,” Josie said.
“There’s younger than me on the road,” I said.
“And the same in Ireland. It’s a desperate time to be a child.”
“I don’t feel like a child anymore.”
“Well, now, aren’t we the grown-up?”
“We might be that,” I said.
Josie made me two sandwiches and it was four in the afternoon when I left her, a day in mid-April, clear and sunny but growing chilly, with sundown an hour away. I would wait until dark to dig up the cage, but what I thought to do was approach our old house, imprint its image on memory, and say farewell to it forever.
I walked toward the city, down the West Troy Road, and when I neared Van Woert Street I gave myself a choice: to approach our house from the rear, over our hill and down through the trees, or walk directly up the street and perhaps meet old neighbors. Explain solitariness if you can: that I, more alone than I had ever been in life, did not want to encounter old neighbors, not even boys my age who’d been close friends. I was such an outcast from all that was home that I craved the intensification of exile. I believe I avoided friends from fear of what proximity to their comforts might arouse in me: anger, perhaps, or envy, or even the desire to steal from them. I saw their rooves and chimneys, their back doors and windows as I neared the street, saw Gallagher’s spavined horse tethered in the back lot of Carney’s grogshop, where my father used to drink. I saw the food store run by Joe Sullivan, who had only one arm. I veered from it all and came at the street from behind the house of the widow Mulvaney, whose husband raised goats before he ran off with a fancy woman and died of intense pleasure.
As I came onto the street proper I saw our house. The railing was off the stoop on one side, the windows all broken in front. Grass grew tall along the walls and in the cracks between the paving slates of the sidewalk. I had heard our landlord died of the cholera and that no one had cared for the house since we left it. The inert quality of the place, the absence of life, gave off a stark aura of isolation, and I now wonder whether I myself was giving off the same aura as I neared the place.
I was no sooner on the path from the Mulvaneys’ to our house than I saw Peaches Plum. He was with one of his brothers and they looked as alike as two peach pits: both blond and skinny, both shoeless. They were prowling about our house, I suppose scavenging, a late moment for that, though truly entrepreneurial scavengers believe in the bottomlessness of others’ dregs. They saw me approaching and Peaches called me by name.
“Yeeouuu been diggin’,” he said to me.
“No,” I said.
“Then why you totin’ that shovel?”
“ ’Cause it’s mine.”
“Ain’t nothin’ in your house,” Peaches said.
“We took most stuff out when the family died,” I said. “What we left wasn’t worth nothin’.”
“You a smarm,” Peaches said. “Smart little poop.”
“You think what you want, Peaches,” I said, and I walked around him toward the house.
“You gonna dig somepin’ with that spade?” he said.
“No, I’m just totin’ it,” I said.
“What good’s a broken spade? Lemme look at it.”
“Leave it alone, Peaches,” I said, and I picked up a rock the size of a potato. “And you leave me alone, too. I ain’t in none of your way, so don’t you go bein’ in mine.”
Peaches respected rocks. He and his brother (we called him Outa) stared me down and picked up rocks of their own. I kept my eye at a level with Peaches’s and picked up a second potato, which made Peaches respect me twice as much. Peaches nodded at me and smiled. Then he wagged his head at Outa, and they went their way and left me alone with two fistfuls of rock. I stood where I was and knew they would look back, both of them, and they did, for the snake is the primal contortionist.