Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  ROUND THREE

  The Patriot came to his work this time with anger at the Mick’s funny saying, rushed like a hornet on ice at the Waterman, firing pell-mell, lefts, rights, and whizzers at the Water’s nasal organ. Water comes back bing-bing, and we see the claret running free from the Brawn’s nostrilations. First blood has been declared for the Pet, which raised the clamor of three-to-one on Patriotism and plenty of takers, including Brawny Boy himself, who ordered the Rat to take a cud of the old green from his jacket and off play the action. The Water let his bottleman second him while the Rat did his duty at the bank.

  ROUND FOUR

  The boys came up to scratch, the Pet again for business with vigor from Yankee heaven, pinning the Water boy on the ropes and hitting him at will. What happened to yer brawn, Johnny boy? Oh, it was fearful, and the claret thick as pea soup. Was he gone from us? Hardly. The skiffer outs with an ungodly roger up from the decks of Satan’s scow; evil was that punch and it hit the True One in his breadbasket, loosing the crumbs it did, for a great noise came out of the Patriot’s bung and he went flat as Dutch strudel.

  ROUND FIVE

  The Brawn lost blood, all right, but he’s a game one. Up for mischief again, he leveled a terrible cob on the Pet’s left ogle, leaving Pet’s daylights anything but mates, and the blood of the Patriot gushed out like the spout on a he-goat. The Skiffer grabbed the Pet’s head of cabbage around the throttle and used every exertion to destroy the Patriot’s vocal talent, which we thought a pity, for the Patriot loves to sing duets with his sweetpea, that lovely tune, “I won’t be a nun, I shan’t be a nun, I’m too fond of Arthur to be a nun.” The seconds separated the battlers and it was called a round.

  ROUND SIX

  Oh, the punishment. The Yankee Pet came up to scratch, erect on his pins, and lit out at the Skitter’s cabbage bag, but an uppercut sent him sliding like a chicken in a blizzard. The Brawn follows with the lefties and righties to the ogles, the smeller, and the domino case, but the Pet won’t go down. Tough he was and tough he stayed, but dear God the blood. No quarter now from the God of Water, who goes after the Pet’s chinchopper and schnotzblauer, which is a bleeding picture, and one of Erin’s poets in the crowd observes, “Don’t our John do lovely sculpture?”

  ROUND SEVEN

  The Patriot came to the scratch in a wobble of gore, both eyes swollen and all but closed, his cheek slit as if by a cutlass, the blood of life dripping down his chest and he spitting up from his good innards. Was ever a man bloodier in battle? I think not. Yet the Pet of Patriotism, a flag himself now—red, white, and blue, and seeing the stars and stripes—moved at the Skiffman, who had contusions of his own, but none the worse for them. And the Skiff let go with a snobber to the conk that put the Pet to patriotic sleep. Old Gory went down like a duck and laid there like a side of blue mutton. A sad day for the Natives, and Green rises to the top like the cream of Purgatory.

  We would judge the victory a popular one in this pasture, city, state, nation, and hemisphere, opinions to the contrary notwithstanding. John McGee proved himself a man of grain and grit, and the True Yankee now knows the measure of his own head. For those who wanted more fight, well, more there was—and plenty, too, which the Yankees found to their liking, loving punishment as they do.

  A good time was had by all, nobody got killed that we know of, and the nigger carried off John the King on his shoulders.

  John McGee, the black man’s burden, retired after this fight, claiming the American championship, and rightly so. He left his Blue Heaven only for occasional trips to Boston, New York, and other centers of manly vice to box with Joshua and a few select sparring mates in exhibitions for the sporting crowd. He was heroized everywhere and he approved of such. But in New York (he once told Joshua) he felt kin to all that he saw: the antlike mob of Irish, the Irish political radicals, the city politicians, the gamblers, the brawlers, the drinkers, and oh, those lovely women.

  John always said he retired from fighting for the sake of his nose. “No sensible woman,” he said, “wants a man whose nose is twice as wide as itself, or that travels down his face in two or three assorted directions.”

  The power that our hero manifested in galvanizing the attention and loyalty of other men, the magic of his name and fists, generated wisdom of the moment in Manhattan’s Democratic politicians. And so they hired John to round up a few lads and fend off the gangs hired by politicians of the Native American stripe, the most vicious and fearsome of these headed by Bill (The Butcher) Platt, whose method was directness itself: invade the polling places in Democratic strongholds and destroy the ballot boxes. But the presence of the newly fearsome John McGee was a countervailing influence, which by dint of bludgeons, brickbats, and bloody knuckles proved the superiority of several Democratic candidates for public office in the great city.

  For his accomplishments John was rewarded with the right to open an illegal gambling house, and assured he need never fear the law as long as there were honest Democratic judges in the world. He began his career with humbleness: three faro tables that catered to gamblers with no money. Perceiving limitations in this arrangement, John persuaded men of foresight to back his expansion, and in a few years owned sixteen gambling hells, including the most luxurious in the city, a Twenty-fourth Street brownstone furnished in high elegance (a taste John had acquired in the mansions of Hillegond and Obadiah), replete with sumptuous dining and endless drink, and featuring a dozen faro tables, two roulette wheels, and private poker salons where John on occasion, or by challenge, played for the house.

  I never heard John utter a word on behalf of slaves or against slavery, but as he rose in the world, so did Joshua, working for John as Mick the Rat, as sparring mate, as doorman in the gambling house, and eventually as the most adept of faro dealers, nimble-fingered fleecer of rich men in John’s lush parlors. Joshua did this work when he could, but more than half of his time was spent conducting on the Underground Railroad. By the time the war began he had shunted more than four hundred fugitive slaves toward the North Star. He also owned his own policy house a block away from John’s faro palace on Barclay Street and had four freed slaves working for him, running numbers.

  I spent a fair amount of time with Joshua when I moved to New York. After I broke with Maud on that unpleasant night in her dressing room, I suddenly felt stifled by Albany. The year was 1858 and I had sharpened my writing skills to the point that I felt I could function as an independent. Will Canaday promised to print anything I wrote, I made contact with other editors, and so began a life in New York City. My aim was to work at the Tribune for Horace Greeley, a man whose principles seemed as worthy as Will’s, and in time I summoned the courage to present myself and my clippings at his office.

  “Your dudgeon is admirable,” he told me, and so I went to work on the greatest newspaper in the metropolis. I wrote first of what I knew well: an interview and reminiscence with John McGee about his great boxing days. I also used John’s connection to gain access to the dominantly Irish gangs of the Five Points section (the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies) and write of their ongoing feud with nativist gangs (the American Guards, the Bowery Boys). This warfare was a constant in the city, as many as eight hundred to a thousand young men in deadly battle in the streets at a given time, and the police helpless to curb it.

  I also wrote of Joshua and his former slaves, revealing none of their identities. I printed slave stories as they came out of Joshua’s mouth:

  “Slave named Bandy tried to run away and master slit his feet.

  “Slave named Mandy lost a plow hook plowin’ and master tied her to a tree and whipped her till blood ran down her toes.

  “Slave named Julius was flogged bad for callin’ his master ‘mister.’

  “Slave named Pompey worked for a man had a wife wanted a nigger whipped every time she see one.

  “Slave named George had a master got hisself into a rage in town, came home drunk and shot George in the foot.

  “Slave na
med Abram got old and useless but master wouldn’t send for no doctor. ‘Let him die,’ said master, and old Abram died with creepers in his legs.

  “Slave named Hanson had a master so mean that two hundred lashes was only a promise.

  “Slave named Darius, all he lived on for a year was Indian-meal bread and pot liquor off boiled pork.

  “Slave named Adam ran away and they caught him and tied him to the ground and whipped him to death.

  “Slave named Caroline runnin’ stuff up a hill fell down, got up, kept runnin’, and master whipped her, sayin’, ‘How come you can’t get up that hill faster?’

  “Slave named Tucker got punished for goin’ to a church meetin’ at night. Next mornin’ master called Tucker in and whipped him on the head with the butt of the cowhide, got his gun and hit Tucker on the head with the breech, got the fire tongs and hit Tucker on the head with it, got the parlor shovel and beat Tucker on the head with it; then when Tucker went to leave, master got his knife and sliced Tucker across the stomach and hit him on the head with the knife. But Tucker got away holdin’ his guts in, ran and walked sixteen miles and found a doctor, and almost died for five days but didn’t.”

  So wrote Quinn.

  QUINN, LOOKING STARCHED and fresh in a new shirt and dark-blue dress suit, the only one he owned, wearing also his slouch hat over his day-old haircut, sat in one of the hundred or more rocking chairs on the busy two-hundred-and-fifty-foot porch of the United States Hotel, holding in his lap the Saratoga morning newspaper for today, August 3, 1864, reading a story reprinted from the Tribune about the recent battle at Atlanta, the most disastrous of the war for the rebels: immense slaughter by Sherman’s army. Quinn also read a letter found on a Confederate soldier captured by Grant. The letter was from the man’s brother, a rebel officer, and he wrote: “The capture of Vicksburg and our army last year has proven to be fatal to our cause. We have played a big game and lost. As soon as I am exchanged for a Yankee prisoner I shall leave the Confederacy and the cause for Europe.” And under the headline “Democratic Patriotism” Quinn read: “The Democratic leaders opposed the use of Negro troops as an admission that white men of the North could not vanquish white men of the South. This prevented the raising of many thousand Negro troops. But when the government calls up white men through conscription, the same Democrats strive to defeat it, even inaugurating mobs against it. They won’t let the Negro go, they won’t go themselves, and they claim to be patriotic!”

  Feeling the fear and anger rise in him again, Quinn put the paper aside to watch the arrival of three people, affluent parents with two grown daughters, a pair of petted beauties, or so it looked. Their carriage stopped at the hotel stairs and four young Negro men descended to them instantly, one assisting the women, two attending the abundant luggage, the fourth, with whisk broom, sweeping travel dust from the shoulders of all.

  Quinn, as usual superimposing Joshua’s valiant face on other Negroes, could not complete this picture. He could not imagine Joshua allowing himself even an instant of overt servility, though he’d often worked as a servant. How had the man avoided it? There is a painting of him done by an artist-gambler who frequented John’s gaming house, which, thought the artist, captured Joshua from life: standing against a wall in his white doorman’s jacket, listening to music being played for John’s dinner guests in the next room. There is a smile on Joshua’s face, a benign and folksy response to the music, excavating the simplicity of the Negro soul that is so lulled by, so in harmony with, the sweet melodies of the oboe and the violin.

  But if anything, Joshua’s smile in that painting is a mask of dissimulation, a private recognition that all that exists in this music is the opposite of himself, and that he understands the racial enemy better for having this privileged audience to his pleasures. I have never presumed to truly understand Joshua, but certain things are so self-evident that even the abjectly ignorant are entitled to an opinion, and I therefore aver that Joshua did not aspire to this veranda on which I was sitting, did not aspire to the glut of wardrobe trunks that were being hauled down from the roof of the carriage, did not aspire to join the parade of strutters and predators marching up and down the posh hallways, salons, and drawing rooms of this cavernous hotel, or along the preening streets of the old village, not only did not aspire to own or be owned by such ostentation but despised it for its distance from the reality to which Joshua did aspire: that landless, penurious freedom that was the newborn, elementary glory that followed after slavery.

  I saw Joshua in New York not long after John McGee discovered that Limerick, his purebred Irish setter, for which he had paid eight thousand dollars in a public gesture of contempt for the poverty of his early days, had disappeared. The dog was widely known in the city, trumpeted in the gossipist newspapers as the luckiest dog in town, not because it was owned by an affluent world-champion fighter but because a rub of its head had propelled more than a few gamblers into great winnings as they fought the tiger at John’s faro tables. John, of course, had invented this story.

  When John discovered Limerick’s absence from the house, the bedrock of Manhattan trembled with crisis. John sent emissaries into the streets to find him, dispatched Joshua to the police lockup for animals, this being the priority, for stray, unmuzzled dogs were poisoned daily at sunrise and carted to the dump by noon, and owners, if traceable, were fined five dollars for letting a cur run loose in the rabid months of summer. And we were in July. I caught up with Joshua on the street and learned of the impending tragedy as we walked.

  “Damn dog don’t know when he’s well off,” Joshua said.

  “He run away before?”

  “He try. Seem like he need the street, that dog. He ain’t no house dog.”

  “Maybe they already poisoned him.”

  “May be,” said Joshua. “Then look out. John gonna desecrate any cop kill his dog.”

  We found the dog poisoners taking their leisure, somewhat removed from the doomed bayings that erupted beyond a wooden partition in a warehouse built of failing brick, crude slatwork, and chicken wire. We confronted the sergeant in charge, presented our case, and were led by a rankless lackey to the wire pen where two dozen dogs, most of them mangy mongrels, but among them a fox terrier, a bull, a husky, and a collie, were all leaping and barking their frenzy at us. Limerick was among them, suddenly beside himself with joy at recognizing Joshua.

  “How much it cost to take that red dog outa here?” Joshua asked the lackey.

  “One dollar, but you can’t take him out without a muzzle.”

  “You got a muzzle I can buy?”

  “Yep.”

  “How much it cost?”

  “One dollar.”

  Joshua counted the dogs in the pen.

  “You got twenty-six muzzles?”

  “Yeah. Got a hundred.”

  “Then we gonna muzzle up these dogs and take ’em all.”

  “Take ’em all?”

  “That all right with you?”

  “Whatayou gonna do with twenty-six dogs?”

  “Gonna make me a dog house.”

  Joshua pulled a roll of bills from his pocket to prove his seriousness. Then we muzzled the dogs and turned them loose. With luck they’d find a way to get rid of the muzzles before they starved to death. But poison at sunrise was no longer their fate.

  Gordon and Maud arrived at the hotel porch precisely at eleven, the hour of rendezvous, Maud ebullient in a pink frock with matching silk shawl, wide skirt with sweeping train, and her burnished red hair in large, loose curls. Gordon, striding purposefully beside her, looked so brilliantly fresh in his starched cravat, tan linen shirt, claw-tailed coat, and new brown boots that Quinn felt he should return to his own room and find dandier clothes. Having none, he loathed the thought and vowed to become unkempt by midafternoon.

  “Ah, you have the newspaper,” said Gordon. “I just heard it has an item that must be read.”

  Quinn handed him the newspaper, and Gordon sat in a rocker and b
usied himself with print.

  “You look like a bouquet of roses,” Quinn told Maud.

  “How poetic of you, Daniel.”

  “What do you have in store for me today?”

  “Something beyond your imagination.”

  “Nothing is beyond my imagination,” said Quinn.

  “Opening day at a brand-new racetrack, you can’t know what to expect.”

  “I thought you might have something more exotic in mind.”

  “Your old friends John McGee and Magdalena will be on hand. They’re quite exotic in their way, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Perhaps later,” said Maud. “Do you find Saratoga changed?”

  “More crowded, more money, more hotels, more women.”

  “You’ve kept busy watching the women, then.”

  “It seems like the thing to do when you sit on this veranda. Clearly they come here to be looked at.”

  “Do you like my new dress? It’s the same color as the one I was wearing when we met.”

  “Very nostalgic of you, my dear.”

  “Nostalgia is not my purpose,” said Maud.

  “This is vile,” said Gordon, rustling the newspaper angrily. “It’s a letter. They’re referring to your aunt.”

  “What could they say about her that hasn’t already been said a hundred times?” Maud asked.

  “It’s clearly a threat because of her party tonight,” said Gordon. He thrust the paper at Quinn and Maud, and together they read the letter:

  Mr. Editor—I would advise a certain aging ex-theatrical performer to keep a sharp eye out today for revelations of what she and her kind mean to this community. We who try to elevate the life of Saratoga are appalled at the degradation she is imposing on our society with her ridiculous social ambitions. We suggest she depart across our borders as soon as possible and rid us of the repugnant memories of her scandalous life. Courtesans are of the lowest order of mammal, and performing courtesans who kick up their legs for the edification of the rabble are a pox on our community.