And so goodbye.
We saw signs of Emmett’s circus as we neared the railroad station: mobs of people being herded out of the city by constables and sheriff’s men on horseback. I sat beside Emmett in his wagon and we watched them pass.
“Pay heed to these people and remember what you see,” he said to me, and I remember him as vividly as the rest, his great wavy mane of black hair crowning him with handsome abundance, his eyes as strong as nuggets of iron. And so in memory I heed him as much as I heeded that troubled throng. Here came a man with two children on his shoulders and three more in tow, a woman nursing slung babies at both naked breasts as she walked along. The day was chill, but some men walked bare-chested, galluses holding their trousers, their feet in rotting boots. A man with a bull terrier under his arm had grown neck whiskers like a dog collar, his face otherwise clean of hair. A boy in a small cart drawn by a jackass played on the pennywhistle a Gaelic air I remember my father whistling, and naughty women with chemises visible and skirts flying threw visions of hip and thigh at men and women both (one of them eyed me), taunting in the Irish tongue all who watched the parade from windows and doorways. One man wore no shoes, his feet wrapped in cloth. Another carried a short club, the Irishman’s gun, ready for impromptu battle. Men wore hobnail boots, hats of straw and felt, caps of leather and fur, tall hats, plug hats, sailor hats, vests. Women wore bonnets and shawls or nothing on their heads, sweaters, tattered coats, threadbare cloaks, long skirts. They carried brooms, and straw boxes, bags and valises tied with rope. Their stockings were rolled, their hair in buns or loose to the middle of their back like my mother’s, some of the loose-haired ones loose as well with affection to the men who pawed and patted them as they walked, those patters clad in tailcoats and knee britches with holes in the knees, men carrying pails and whiskey bottles and a small pig in a basket. One man pissed like a horse in the street, and an entire clustered family of six gripped one another’s hands in fearful dignity.
Emmett told me stories of some of these people. He had been moving among them for a week to hear their tales, discover news from Ireland, help where and how he could. His concern for them was missionary: he had been one of them himself when he came here. His fervor to work for their betterment would grow in him with the passing years and affect my life profoundly. He told me of one man who stole a sack of horsehides, was arrested trying to sell them back to their owner and went to jail for it, leaving his family destitute. He told of a man long off the whiskey who came home drunk and singing and urged his sullen wife to sing with him, but she would not, and so he beat her with a crock and went to jail for it, leaving her destitute.
“They’re lost, most of them,” Emmett said to me. “And who wouldn’t be? They’ve left all they knew, and all they’ve got is what they can wear and carry. But if lost it is, then some say this is the land to be lost in, for it all comes right again here. Would you agree to that, lad?”
I nodded my head yes, but I thought of Dirck and his absent tongue, and of lost Joshua and his fugitive life, and of the dead Swede who could no longer agree life would come right again; and it remained to be seen whether the lives of the Ryans would ever again be other than a tissue of days with open sores.
“Look at them,” Emmett said to me. “Study the face and the eyes and the gait of the walking misery that’s come to visit.”
They passed on then, the last of them, and Emmett followed their steps with his horse and wagon. Ahead we could see them climbing into the railroad carriages that would take them west, the carriage windows down, some wet wash and portable bedding already getting the air, the children barefoot and on holiday, racing on the cobbles and gravel, a snarling dog clubbed by a militiaman’s rifle, a piglet dropped and running loose beneath a carriage. I scrambled under the car to catch it, but the pig could run faster than I could crawl, and it ran into the tall grass by the tracks, lost forever to the old man who dropped it.
Thirty-four cars they occupied, not the longest train I ever saw but the one whose memory is vivid still. We watched until they were all on board. A man of middle years, his shirt in tatters, a half-eaten chicken leg in his hand, stood alone on the steps of the train and began a song in the Gaelic, that strange tongue rendered brilliant by the man’s plaintive voice. Silence came onto the crowd and we listened to the minstrel, I with a growing wonder in my heart at all the joy and misery that simultaneously commanded so many unknown lives. The train whistle interrupted the sound of the song but not the singer, and as the cars moved out, his voice reached us in fragments, audible between the whistle blasts, a fervent melody struggling to be heard. And then it was gone.
While we waited for my train Emmett and I talked of Ireland, and of family, and of my future, and of how I was always welcome at his home, which I well knew, and then my train was there, bound for Saratoga.
I boarded knowing, with every willful step, that I had once and for all obliterated the image of myself as helpless, hapless orphan, tossed off a canalboat like so much off al. Nor was I a greenhorn victim, not anymore. I still do not know why I knew this so firmly, but it was true. It remained to be seen whether fate would again ravage my life, but at the moment luck was with me, and I felt an extraordinary rapture, full of the music of sunrise. As I waved farewell to Emmett, I and my train moved northward with that same boiling energy that we had, at the dawn of the light, stolen from the gods.
The Dumb Cake Saratoga, Spring 1850
WHEN MAGDALENA COLÓN stepped onto the stage at Utica, her first public appearance after leaving Albany, her overarching impulse was to tell the audience of her death and resurrection. But with John’s words strong in her brain, she stifled the urge. What John had said to her was, “You talk of that and they’ll think you’re daft as a bloody owl.”
By Syracuse Magdalena could stifle herself no longer. In a voice reverberating with all the humility of a heavenly choir’s frailest angel, she stepped delicately to center stage and offered her thanks to God for resurrecting her from the dead. She told her story of the child at the bottom of the river who had welcomed her to the birthplace of dreams. She expatiated on her pleasant time under water in the land of luminous dolls and, with a great surge of her mystical wisdom, told her listeners they should not fear crossing over into death, because it was so attractive over there. “Also,” she said, “there is always the chance of turning around and coming right back.” She concluded by saying, “I can’t imagine a more pleasant experience than dying.”
She then went into her performance: a song first, then her famed Spider Dance, in which she shook off an attack of imaginary arachnids that were climbing her skirts and bodice, and in so doing revealed more flesh than was generally provided to American audiences outside of brothels. Alas, her report on the beyond had taken its effect. The audience tittered at her dancing, and her vaunted sinfulness was paled over with an aureole of humbug sanctity.
A Syracuse newspaper reported on Magdalena’s disquisition:
DANCER CLAIMS RESURRECTION
The Spanish dancer Magdalena Colón, who calls herself La Última, performed for an overabundance of spectators last night but failed to arouse either the condemnatory or the lascivious reactions her dancing has produced in other cities. After evoking the Deity by describing Him as a small female child clutching a doll, the dancer spoke of her own experience drowning in the river and of being resurrected from death at a much later hour by the ministrations of love. It might be said of her performance that while it, too, perished, resurrection was not a consequence.