There exists in the spectacle of a mass of men in fistic battle a love of punishment and pain, a need to be smashed in the mouth by life or else risk losing sight of what is necessary to survival. In the war I would see much worse, but I’d seen nothing before to equal the violence of this day: the ripped shirts, the bloody faces, the noses and ears bitten half off, the torn and bloody fists with their naked bones, men spitting out teeth, men unable to stand, one man shot but the pistol never found, a dozen men stabbed, two dozen with fractured heads, and some to die of these things and be buried in secret, one of the Palmers stabbed in both arms and never the same after. I saw Emmett remove from the fray the man who did that stabbing, a Ryan, but one not to Emmett’s liking, and so he punched him, but once, on the side of the head, and the man fell like ten pounds of liver. Emmett took the man’s dirk from his hand and rolled him down the hill.
Women ministered to fallen battlers, blotting their wounds, pulling them to safer turf. I spied a man whose face was the color of a ripe tomato, a scorch in full bloom, and I wondered, is this Alfie Palmer? The raw look of him just might have come from a bath in boiling tea. (How had the Ryans boiled their tea in that closed shack? I saw no chimney, nor any opening for one. Did they live amid smoke?) Such was Palmer’s face (and it was his) that it could not have heretofore eluded me, and I concluded he was a latecomer to the battle. But that face was known, and when it appeared, it magnetically convened the Ryan lust for vengeance, Alfie quickly ringed by more men than could possibly reach him with club or fist. He knocked down two Ryans with his club before he went under: under by choice, I must now think, for what reasons other than guilt, or suicidal madness, could have compelled him to enter this battlefield of hate as a willful target?
He went down and felt the rain of kicks by Ryan brogans until a group of Palmers moved in for the rescue. But rescue the principal Palmer of the day they could not; for while other Ryans beat the Palmers back, a man all in Albany would come to recognize from this instant forward as Horse Houlihan, a lumber handler of immense size and girth, picked up the inert Alfie and, with great strength and unerring method, broke both his arms and both his legs, cracking each arm over bent knee, stepping on each leg and then snapping it upward, the reverse of its natural flex. The pain of the first break revived Alfie into a scream, but he then lapsed back into his coma and accepted the other fractures without a whimper.
The battle moved in splintered struggles away from the useless Alfie, the last of his reduction being the gob of spit Horse Houlihan loosed on him. And there he lay, a man of spoiled body and soul, a testament to what? To an incomplete understanding of the forces that had been unleashed through his loss of job and death of son; of even less comprehension now of what he himself had released with his random vengeance on the tragic Toddy.
Madness was insufficient designation for what had come of it, for what arose among the battlers was not pathology but something more conscious of itself: the final horrific begetting now blossoming in Joey Ryan, who came out of the crowd after the spectators had shifted with the flow. He found himself standing alone, moving slowly forward and then kneeling to perform with stunning malice the final coda of Alfie’s saga: pummeling the near-dead face of his father’s murderer with his slungshot as he shouted “Bastard man, bastard man” over and over, until I pulled him away and was, myself, struck by inadvertence with the weapon, no less painfully for Joey’s lack of intent. My intervention came too late, for the slungshot had created bloody craters on Alfie’s face and permanently blinded his right eye, a total blinding having been Joey’s intention from the moment he espied the inert form.
I cuffed Joey and flung his weapon away from him, pulled him by the arm off the battlefield in the general direction of the mansion, and we left all Ryans and Palmers behind us. The Ryans, after several retreats, regroupings, and two hours of blood, finally routed the Palmers. Alfie Palmer survived to become the half-blind cripple of Arbor Hill, spent four years in jail after confessing the murder of Toddy Ryan, and lived out his remaining days as drunken beggar and infamous martyr to the unfathomable rhythms of rage.
Newspapers reported on the battle, calling it a feud between Papists and Americans, between the Irish and the Know-Nothings (who numbered in their political ranks the enraged nativists and assorted hybrid-haters bent on shaping a balance in this republic of equals by expelling the unequals). Will Canaday, in a departure from reasonableness, noted that a number of probable deaths, and an unmeasurable maiming of heads, had been effected in the battle, and he concluded: “It is not enough. Let them keep at it until there are no more of their heads to be broken.” Will’s view was widely shared, for it had been brought home to us all that the mob at fury’s peak has no politics, no ethnic allegiance, no religion, but is a rabid beast with bloody claws, and must be neutralized.
On the Monday after the battle I went with Dirck to hear Lyman Fitzgibbon as he mounted a loading platform on the wharf of his foundry and delivered his gospel to the work force at the hour of high noon. He announced he would sustain the cost of repairing Alfie Palmer’s bones but would otherwise leave the fool to his fate; that he would, with great heart, give moral and financial support to the widow and children of Toddy Ryan; that his foremen would hereafter monitor all comparable battles and would note, for purposes of effecting terminal discharge from foundry employ, the name of any worker involved; that he would write his will to encourage his heirs and assigns to do likewise; that he believed in his soul that we are here on this earth to court peaceful ways in the name of the good Christ, and may those who choose otherwise boil forever in the fluid caldrons of hell.
The silent men, surely not persuaded into pacificity by any such pietisms, began the antcrawl back to their furnaces, boilers, puddles, and moulds to ponder the vagaries of existence. Then, in this peculiar ironbound world under one benevolent God, the making of stoves was resumed, for now and forever, amen.
Lyman held forth later that evening in the drawing room of the Staats mansion, eulogizing Dirck, about whom, he said, he felt a certain guilt, but also recollecting with heartfelt agony the probable stirrings of Petrus in his grave over Dirck’s book and the furor it generated in this city; for he knew Petrus feared that precisely such, as did, would occur: that Dirck would fall victim to the low pursuit of the word and with mischievous results.
Hillegond corrected Lyman, saying Dirck’s pursuits were in no wise low or mischievous, but of a high moral order such as others rarely reach. It is true, she said, that he is peculiar and ill-clad (and she eyed my own attire with disdain); but Dirck was also kindly, courageous, and brilliant, and she was proud of him.
“Yes, of course,” said Lyman. “We are all proud of the boy. Proud, proud, proud. But his father would have loathed the publication of that ruinous book. Didn’t your son know that his father was a founder of The Society?”
Dirck promptly stood and wrote his answer at the inkstand under the portrait of Petrus in his senescence, wrote with unerring speed of quill, after which I, with rounded vowels, read his words to alclass="underline" “Of course I knew. Masked man who ordered my tongue cut, and also ordered against my murder, was giving obeisance to power of Father’s residual status in The Society.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Lyman, addressing his remarks to me. “But I’m suggesting you apologize on behalf of your father for what you wrote. If you do, I myself will resign publicly from The Society on grounds that this once splendid brotherhood’s high moral aim has fallen into low estate, corrupted by latter-day scoundrels.”