While Lyman contemplated probable death by absurdity, Emmett garroted one of the attackers and bargained the man’s breath for the two captives, an act of bravery that ensured not only his own security ever after through Lyman’s gratitude, but also the education of any Daugherty heir not yet born, or even conceived, on this night of tribulation in the foyer of Hillegond’s mansion.
Maud, I speak to you now of the Irish, knowing you are in my pocket, to tell you of the Ryans and their misery and how it distracts me, for it is part of me: Joey Ryan — with broken nose, dead father, sickly mother — is surely myself in another guise, just as Molly Ryan, that tiny waif, could be you. They are the famine Irish, Maud, and they are villains in this city. It wasn’t this way for the Irish when I was little, but now they are viewed not only as carriers of the cholera plague but as a plague themselves, such is their number: several thousand setting up life here in only a few years, living in hovels, in shanties, ten families to a small house, some unable to speak anything but the Irish tongue, their wretchedness so fierce and relentless that not only does the city shun them but the constabulary and the posses meet them at the docks and on the turnpikes to herd them together in encampments on the city’s great western plain. Keep them moving is the edict of the city’s leaders, and with obscene pleasure the Albany wharf rats and river scum (some Irish among these, preying on their own) carry out this edict by stoning the canalboats that try to unload newcomers here. It is no wonder the greenhorns grow feral in response, finding in this new land a hatred as great as that which drove them out of Ireland, that suppurating, dying sow of a nation.
Looking at the Ryans one could believe them carriers of any perniciousness: defeated, low in spirit, clad in rags, their skin flaked, pale, and dirty, their hair matted, their eyes raw with the disease of all victims. Who would invite their like? Who would give them bread or bed? None in this city today, and yet not quite none, for Hillegond is doing for them what she did for us: telling Capricorn to find them street and bed clothes; telling Matty to cook for, cleanse, and accept them on their night of trouble here in this haven for ravaged souls.
People are breaking into groups in the mansion, Maud. In the east parlor Emmett, Will, and Lyman are in dark communion. In the music room Dirck is boldly handing notes to Heidi Grahn. In the foyer Joseph Moran is extolling to Hillegond the virtues of her home. “It’s more splendid than any house in Utica,” he coos, and she receives his word as if he mattered. I want with desperation of heart to read the rest of your letter and yet I cannot. I am beginning to sense what it will say and I choose postponement until I have intuited your full message, believing if I am right in my intuition we will be closer than ever and this communion across the miles will be with us for the rest of our lives.
And so I have sought out the person with whom I have most in common: Joey Ryan of the bleeding nose — but bleeding no more — seated now at the kitchen table eating Matty’s chicken soup and corn bread. I told him I was sorry for his trouble and that my father was dead also, and at least he had his mother with him, but that my mother was dead and so was my sister.
“You’re an orphan, then,” he said.
“I am.”
“What do they do to orphans? Do they kill them?”
“I’ve never heard of that,” I said, “and they haven’t killed me yet. But sometimes they put them in orphan homes, and sometimes they let them run loose.”
“I’d fancy to run loose,” he said.
“I would too,” I said.
“Run loose till I grow up enough to solve the man who killed me father.”
“How will you solve him?”
“I’ll break his skull.”
“You aren’t big enough for that.”
“I’ll get bigger and find him and break his skull like he broke me father’s.”
“They’ll hang you.”
“Do they hang orphans?”
“They hang you for breaking a man’s skull.”
“Will they hang the man that killed me father?”
“If they catch him they might.”
“I’ll hang him meself, and then I’ll cut off his head.”
Maud, the boy is a little fellow, no bigger than yourself. But vengeance burns in his eyes, and if he doesn’t break one man’s skull before long, he’ll break another’s. Anger took seed in him farther back than the clubbing of his father, as I learned when I asked where he came from in Ireland.
“From a ditch near Cashel,” he said. “The landlord tumbled our house and put us off our land, and me father piled all we owned in a cart and we pushed it till we couldn’t climb the hill. Then we lived in the ditch and used the wagon as a roof. We could see the Galty Mountains from the ditch. They tumbled our house to make room for the landlord’s cows. ‘They’re in grave need of pasture,’ the landlord told me pa. Then we left the ditch, threw things away to lighten our load, and the three of us hauled the cart up the mountain, a terrible high mountain of four hundred feet it was, and me sister settin’ the block at the wheel. We done it at last and got over the mountain, but goin’ down the back side was near as troublesome as goin’ up the front, and we almost lost the cart two or three assorted times. We begged food, and when we couldn’t get any we stole it, or we ate grass. Then we went to me uncle’s place on the road to Tipperary and he took us in and paid for Pa to go to America. Pa himself is all of us that went over. The night before he left we had a wake for his leavin’, with me ma keenin’ for hours over his goin’. ‘Ye won’t come back for us,’ she kept saying. It was near to bury him, is what it was. But he sent remittances and got us all over here, me and me sister and me mother. And didn’t we all come to this town of Albany, because we couldn’t fit in New York in the wee room Pa lived in. We was here just a few weeks and no money left when he got the foundry job, and then, a little after that, they broke his skull, the man did, the bastard man.”
I talked more with him, Maud, but it was so painful I soon left him and thought of going to bed, for I could find no one else to talk to. People were all over the house talking of the coming fight and how awful it would be, and I knew I would watch it when it came. More death is what I thought, and that put me in mind of the Dood Kamer, where you and I watched John and Magdalena and Hillegond love each other, after a fashion, and that was where I sat and read your letter.
Dearest Daniel [you began],
I write to you because a person named Joseph K. Moran has said he met you and that you asked for my well-being, for which I send gratitude. I worry, too, about your well-being, for you know I consider you my true love for all time and ever after, and am awaiting the fulfillment of your promise to steal me away from my loving but inconstant aunt and her companion, the ridiculous John McGee. That man had the boldness to tell me you stole money from us, then jumped off the canalboat and ran away. I told him he was a poor liar and a worse scoundrel, and when I received the full impact of your absence I went into a swoon and as in the past I refused to eat, coming so near to death I terrified everyone. I think you would have been quite proud of me. A most peculiar thing happened in my starving condition. I could see what people around me were thinking, not an uplifting thing to be able to do. I also was able to communicate with spirits of the dead, or at least I think they are dead. They certainly seem to be spirits, for no one can see them, not even I. Yet they make violent sounds, of which everyone save myself is terribly frightened. I rather like their rhythms.