“I know Joey. I want to help him.”
“Then folly your nose that way and ye won’t miss it.”
My nose led me along a dirt lane, soft from the previous day’s moderate rains, to a turning where I saw a crowd of people, and above them the head and shoulders of a young man in sweater and cap, standing in a wagon, haranguing the crowd in vibrant oratory: “This is what comes of bein’ an Irish workin’man,” and he turned his gaze downward, then up again to the crowd. “A good man. . alive with the family last night. . then murdered in front of his children. . Toddy Ryan gone today. . who’ll go tomorrow?”
The silent crowd was with the man, nodding its reverence. Children on the edge moved away when his pause broke their attention. A gray-haired woman in a threadbare shawl pushed forward, her hair tight in a bun, her jaw jutting out with anger.
“I knew Toddy Ryan,” she said. “He was a good man and he deserves better than you’re givin’ him. Look at him there, shameful.” (We all looked toward the wagon, but I could see nothing because of intervening bodies.) “Bring the man indoors and wake him properly. It’s sacrilegious, this is.”
“Ah, close your mutt, woman,” said the man in the wagon. “They’ll be after you next, and then after your children.”
“Where’s this fight you’re talkin’ about?” a man in the crowd asked.
“We start at the foot of Lumber Street,” came the answer. “There’ll be clubs there for all. We’ll move in a body and meet the divvil himself if he’s a mind to fight us.”
Satisfied with the answer, the questioner nodded and moved away. Others followed him, leaving an opening that let me see the wagon. Toddy Ryan lay on three boards nailed together, tied down with a rope around his waist so he wouldn’t slide off, the boards slanted to allow us full view of his final image: hands folded on his chest, toes of his shoes too long and turned up, ill-fitting clothes full of stains and holes — a runt of a man who, in addition to being horridly dead, had died in terrible health. His cranial cleft and the caked blood of his wound were the unforgettable focus of the cautionary tableau he offered us: here lies a dead Irishman.
The speaker resumed his harangue and some in the crowd fell away. But newcomers kept arriving in a steady stream, and I learned that Toddy, since daybreak, had been on tour of all Irish neighborhoods in the city’s north and west ends, a traveling theater piece: drama in the flesh. I asked a woman beside me where the dead man had lived.
“Over there, isn’t it?” she said, pointing to a board shanty. I went to it and saw the door and wooden latch Alfie Palmer had kicked in. I called Joey’s name but got no answer, then saw the interior was dark and barren, lit only by the light from the open door, and on the floor a broken clay pot and rusty tin cup. Whatever else of life’s things the Ryans once owned had been removed by scavengers. Sunlight shone across the large bloodstain on the dirt floor where Toddy Ryan bled his profuse last.
I considered what I should do in this place, then stepped fully inside, closed the door, and shut out the day. The room became blackness of a deep order. I breathed the smell of earth and tried to imagine the life of the Ryans in this tiny room, then tried to imagine them living in a ditch with their wagon as a roof. Poor as we Quinns had been (and we had gone weeks without money, our food all charity from relatives), never were we dirt poor, nor ever before had I understood the meaning of that phrase: to live day and night inhaling the odor of raw earth. I felt like a burrowing animal, and thought how the Ryans must have cursed all things and people that had brought them to this condition, and how they must have envied all who lived above it.
I stepped back into the sunlight and saw that Toddy, the wagon, the recruiter, and his crowd were all gone. I followed the lane and fell in line soon enough behind the wagon, the recruiter now seated and holding the reins but still hailing all gawkers with his spieclass="underline" “Hullo and listen to us now. . look here on the corpse of Toddy Ryan. . killed for being Irish. . clubs for all at the foot of Lumber Street. . we’ll show them who we are. . we’ll send them to blazes. .”
We passed Patroon Street, several dozen of us now in the growing parade with Toddy’s wagon, and we moved north on Broadway in the warming sunlight of the morning. I could see the crowd of men looming ahead of us, twice as large as the group I’d seen on the hill. These were young men, mostly hatless and in shirtsleeves, vibrant in their gestures, anticipating the greater vibrancy of battle. A dozen or two smaller boys were fighting mock duels with the promised clubs that were being handed out from a wagon. I knew a few of the men: Walter White and Petey Carey from Van Woert Street; Midge McTigue, who had worked at the lumberyard with my father. I guessed that my father would have been with these men had he been alive. I could not find Joey Ryan but I saw Emmett, still unshaven, probably sleepless, and looking gravely upset as he grabbed two men by their shirts. I heard his words: “It’s madness to fight uphill. . madness to fight at all this way.”
“Too late for that jabber, Emmett,” one man said, knocking Emmett’s hand from his shirt.
Emmett pushed through to the head of the crowd to yell to them all, “Don’t do this, men. . we’ll have a dozen corpses among us before the day is out. .”
One hoarse voice called out, “By the Christ, let’s get on with it,” and at that the men, numbering sixty at least, strode forward up Lumber Street, some of them pocketing stones as they went. And then came the rap of the clubs on the cobblestones in steady tattoo: rap, step, rap, step, rap, step, rap — this in march cadence, which the men’s feet found compatible; and they moved to it. Emmett saw me, came to me, grabbed my arm.
“You’re not in this, boy. I say you’re not.”
“I was looking for Joey Ryan. He’s out to get Alfie Palmer.”
“That puny little thing after Alfie?”
“He wants to cut his head off.”
Emmett shook his head. “Madness everywhere,” he said. Then he looked at the men moving up the hill. “I’ve got to get with them.”
“Are you going to fight, Emmett?”
“Not if I can help it. But maybe I can do some good.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
“I want to see it.”
“Then see it, but stay on the sides.”
I had no animosity toward Alfie Palmer, whom I didn’t know; nor did I feel it my responsibility to champion the cause of Toddy Ryan beyond keeping track of Joey. I walked with Emmett and we caught up with the men as they turned a corner. Spectators joined us: old men, young men, women and children — all on the run from other streets as word of the battle spread; and we moved like a Roman parade, marching the gladiators to the arena. The men kept themselves a tight body as they marched, but when they sighted the enemy waiting two blocks up Colonie Street hill, some behind barricades, their cries went up: “Kill the bastards. . go now. . get ’em,” and they broke ranks and with wordless screams ran forward.
The Ryans, doing themselves no favor running uphill, ran into a hail of stones and paving blocks. They returned them in kind, but the Palmers, galloping downhill with the help of gravity and raised clubs, flung their bodies at the uphillers and felled sixteen into varying states of unconsciousness, losing only half a dozen of their own number in that opening charge. The smack of fists on flesh, the whap of club on skull collided with the curses and whoops of the warriors. Iron bars came into use, though the dominant fashion was the club, either of these tools cumbersome in close combat and some quickly discarded so as to allow fighting with fists and teeth, the battlers rolling and tussling into the proper position to gouge an eye, chew an ear. The battle opened itself and tumbled down new streets and into the pasture that sloped toward Van Woert Street, the growing mob of spectators ringing the fighters, moving with the most vicious, cheering them on to ever grander gouging and bashing.