“Good Friday, eh?” he had said to her a minute ago as he pulled her by her arm into Amity Alley and put his jackknife to her throat. It was indeed Good Friday. “You think a slut like you, missy, can just do it as she pleases without paying a regular price for the sinning? I’m the one that has to show you the straight truth, make you sacrifice, show what happens when fierce little cunts think they’re too fine to open up for good b’hoys.”
Fatty Freeborn’s anger, more than his lust, was red hot today. Last night after work, he had paid for a whore in Mulberry, down in the Five Points. “What?” his pal Charlie had exclaimed when Fatty bragged this morning about gaffing a sweetie in Bottle Alley. “You fucked Bottle Alley Sally?” The girl, it turned out, was a young man who not only dressed as a convincing woman but had fitted himself with a simulated vagina—a pair of raw pork chops held in place by a raccoon-pelt girdle. The truth of the whore’s gender had somehow escaped Fatty in the dark and in his boozy, ruttish condition. Charlie began howling with laughter, and could not wait to tell every man in the firehouse, if not every b’hoy in the ward.
Fatty Freeborn made Priscilla’s flesh creep. She supposed he wished to make her flesh creep, so now she willed her face smooth and calm—dead—so that it betrayed no wrinkle of disgust.
“You want me to squeeze them nice little dugs of yours, don’t you, slut?” he said as he pawed and pinched at her nipples with the fat fingers of one hand. She made no noise that he might construe as pain or pleasure. Look at the good side of things, Polly Lucking had told her, whenever there happens to be any good side at all. The only good side Priscilla could figure just now was her recollection of the four yankums she had given Fatty Freeborn—they had never lasted as long as a minute, so his awful grunting minute here and now must be almost through.
17
April 22, 1848
New York City
BY HALF PAST three, when Duff and the other men of 15 Engine arrived in Wooster Street, accompanied by their daguerreian chronicler, Timothy Skaggs, the whole corner was aflame. Nine companies, among them three double-decker machines, were already fighting the blaze. Fire had consumed four buildings as it rampaged down Spring Street. It had also burned toward Prince Street through six buildings, and now threatened a seventh. The eighth, next door, was the house of Engine 11.
After 11’s foreman asked Duff to pump Engine 15’s stream onto the building just south of the firehouse and “wet it down good,” there was some mumbled wisecracking among the boys of 15. The building they were drenching was Mrs. Clara Swan’s parlor house, a brothel for gentlemen that also, in neighborly fashion, occasionally invited in small groups of the butchers and plumbers who volunteered at Engine 11. Six young women in evening clothes, two of them crying, stood together on the opposite side of Wooster Street, watching the fire do its work and the firemen do theirs. The prettiest wore a shiny red silk dress and caressed a tabby cat at her bosom. Skaggs set up his tripod to take a picture of the girl in the red dress as she stared past the camera at the fire, engrossed—and then, once he aimed his lens at her, only pretending to be engrossed. In this good sun, her rouged and powdered whore’s face would make an excellent picture.
Among the hustling firemen there was the usual quick, excited, confused small talk about which companies were on the scene and which were expected.
And the Old Dutchman was already on the block, preaching as he walked.
“‘I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom,’” he said, “‘nor your spouses when they commit adultery—for you yourselves are separated with whores, and sacrifice with harlots.’” Duff had heard this reading from the Old Dutchman before. He asked the foreman of Engine 11 to take the coot aside and persuade him to replace the verse with another for the remainder of the afternoon.
This was Duff ’s favorite sort of fire—neither puny nor a monster, but complicated. It was a dozen fires burning together, an orchestra of flame, each fed by a different fuel—taffeta here, hemp there, molasses here, straw there, spruce and curly maple in the violin maker’s here, solvents at the jeweler’s workshop there—and the buildings all had different arrangements of doors and windows and interior walls. Each fire burned at its own rate of speed, and each had its own sound and light and smell. He liked this blaze.
I did not light it. Now that Duff had sworn a sacred oath, he found himself pleased to know that God knew he had not started this one. But he found himself worrying that after the papers described it, Bishop Hughes might think he was responsible.
“Try the old hydrant, Jim,” he said to a man searching for more water to pump. “In Prince, round the corner!”
Now he chastised himself for his presumption and hubris: Dagger John Hughes had more important matters on his mind than what a penitent had told him two weeks ago in the darkness of St. Patrick’s.
An old Negro suddenly staggered out of one of the burning warehouses and fell to the cobblestones. His ankle appeared to be broken, he was coughing blood, and where his smoldering shirt was half burned away Duff could see patches of charred, bubbled flesh. He asked one of 15’s new boys to fetch a doctor from the infirmary in Grand Street.
The kid hesitated and gave Duff a funny look. “For the nigger?”
“Listen,” Duff said, “I’m no bleeding heart for Zip Coon, but this one is burned bad, look at him…” Ever since he’d discovered that the sugarhouse that burned in Duane Street was a local station on the slaves’ Underground Railroad to Canada, Duff had been saying even more extra rosaries in penance. He might have ordered this whippersnapper to get help for a colored man in the past, but now it was one of Duff ’s necessary works of mercy in the name of Jesus Christ. “Go, I mean it, now.”
The right side of Mrs. Swan’s roof had started to billow smoke.
“Crispin! Tommy!” Duff shouted to two men aiming their gooseneck nozzle at the third floor. “Throw it all the way up top, go on, get that wood soppy before she takes fire!”
Bishop Hughes might pay no attention to this blaze, but Duff knew that the local Protestant divines would find it irresistible, that in his Easter sermon this very Sunday some preacher would note with angry glee that in this Holy Week a well-known brothel had burned with hell’s own fire, proving that this city’s own whores and whoremongers were not exempt from the judgment and earthly punishments of the Lord. And Duff wondered if that might be true.
“‘For the wrath of God,’” the Old Dutchman said as he returned up Wooster, pitching his voice louder now to be heard over the roar and crack of the fire, “‘is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness…’”
Duff steeled himself. He would not turn and see the ancient face and look into those startling, rheumy blue eyes. He refused.
“‘Being filled with all unrighteousness. Fornication. Wickedness.’” The old man took a loping step forward as he pronounced each word.
Skaggs, surprised to find that he remembered the words of Romans after so many years, began reciting in a whisper along with the old man as he lugged the camera across the street. “‘Covetousness. Maliciousness. Envy. Murder. Debate. Deceit. Malignity. Whisperers. Backbiters. Haters of God…’”
The Dutchman passed by the boys of 15 Engine and continued around the block again, his catalogue of torments finally becoming inaudible to Duff, who was examining an inch-long split in the seam of one of his hoses.
“‘…spiteful…proud…boasters…inventors of evil things.’”
“‘Inventors of evil things,’” Skaggs repeated in the direction of the old man’s back. “I wonder if he is referring to my camera,” he said to Duff, now beside him.
“He doesn’t mean anything at all,” Duff replied. “He’s insane.”
“Look there,” one of the tearful young women from Mrs. Swan’s shouted as she pointed at a window on the parlor floor. “It’s Mr. Polk! He’s trapped! He’s done for!”
Mr. Polk was Mrs. Swan’s othe
r tabby. The cat stood, hind feet on a windowsill in the parlor, scratching furiously at the panes.
Skaggs returned to his ground glass as he prepared to take another picture. How odd that for the second time in as many weeks, circumstances had made him a witness of emergencies involving imperiled pets and their distraught female owners.
“Please,” the girl in the red silk dress pleaded with the firemen, “I beg you—save President Polk from the flames!”
If Duff dispatched any of his men to save a cat from a brothel—a cat named after the president—he and the rescuer would become the butt of jokes for weeks, perhaps years. However, he could not ignore the desperate animal or the crying girl. He was a good distance from the flames, but he felt the scar on his cheek burning.
“Please, boys?” the girl asked again, looking from fireman to fireman.
Duff turned and saw Tad, his lantern boy. The lad longed to join the fray and fight a fire. And he would recover from any dishonor before he was a grown man.
“Tad,” he said, “take an ax and smash the window and chunk that cat out of there. OK?”
Tad did not move. He looked as if he might cry.
“Go!”
Even as they unspooled their hose and checked the pipe and put on their double-thick leather gloves, the other men were watching and listening to this encounter between Engine 15’s new assistant foreman and the apprentice.
“Duff,” the boy whined quietly, “please, I, I, you, it’s nothing but a cat, if it were—”
Duff ’s posture of command, so sure a moment before, was being resisted. He wanted to beat the boy. Then he wanted to make the sign of the cross. Forgive me, Father. “Tad,” he snarled loudly, enunciating each word carefully, “go get that goddamned pussy out of there before it burns!”
Only one of his men guffawed, but another six or seven covered their mouths or suddenly coughed or ran toward the fire to avoid laughing right in Duff Lucking’s face.
President Polk was saved, but before the blaze was finally quenched his home was damaged badly. Eleven buildings were gutted in all. Skaggs had exposed five plates—three portraits of Mrs. Swan’s girls, a picture of a pile of charred, unfinished violins in the gutter, and another of Tad the lantern boy’s dirty, bloody open palms, cut by the glass shards of the window he’d broken to rescue the cat.
“You know, Duff,” Skaggs said as more and more of the men slowed their pace, lit up cigars, took off their helmets, and dug out the brandy and whiskey, “I cannot run like you boys. In the future, if I’m going to continue to immortalize the men—”
“Shut up, Skaggs.”
“—I shall need to drive directly to the sites of these grand catastrophes of yours. A suggestion: horses.”
This was a sore point among the firefighting fraternity. Only a few companies kept horses to pull their machines—stabling them was expensive, and they were spooked by fire. And Duff grasped the sad, inexorable logic as well: the more that horses pulled engines, the fewer firemen you’d need, and half the firehouses in New York would become obsolete. And once the engines were horse-drawn, the superiority of heavy steam-powered water-pumpers would be inarguable…and before long fighting fires would be just another two-dollar-a-day job of work. He knew Skaggs was right about horses. In all other things Duff was an enthusiast for progress. But he knew that this way of life—packs of New York men running out of their private clubhouses and risking their skins for the wild, noble sport of it—was done for. It counted as one more reason to strike out for the West sooner rather than later.
But…why had Skaggs put it the way he did? “What in the devil’s name do you mean,” he snapped, “these catastrophes of mine?” As Skaggs only stared at him, startled, Duff realized his mistake. “I’m sorry, I, I was, I have been thinking that horses make good sense as well.”
This wasn’t entirely a fib. Out west, men lived in the saddle.
A small gang from Hose 25 came stomping around the corner from Spring, ostensibly to inspect the damage on Wooster, actually to tease and roister a little bit.
Among them was Fatty Freeborn.
“Ohhh,” Fatty shouted from the end of the block, “you lousy little rats don’t have no dock here—do you, boys?” Fatty’s men smiled at his lame joke. Number 15 had been called the “dock rats” for years, a nickname from when they sucked water for their hoses straight from the river.
Duff made no reply, not even a grimace. He turned back to his friend. “Say, Skaggs,” he asked, “do you know the word ‘materialism’? I read it someplace, and my Webster’s says it’s a philosophy, about how there is no soul at all separate from our body and brain—but this magazine article was all about ladies shopping for goblets and paintings. It puzzled me.”
“‘Materialism’?” Skaggs gave him a quizzical look. Duff did not appear feverish. “Well, yes, it is a philosophy…an extremely sensible ancient Greek philosophy which many respectable people, my father included, consider to be identical with atheism. The idiot writing in your magazine, however, apparently trumped up some stupid new meaning…” He stopped. Duff was staring and nodding like an overeager schoolboy. “Are you feeling well, Duff? Do you need to sit down?”
Duff shook his head in a casual, ordinary way. No glance over Skaggs’s shoulder or flicker of his eyes indicated that someone was approaching them from behind.
“Hey, Mr. Money Changer,” Fatty Freeborn said to Duff, “I’ve got another bag of pennies saved, and I’m good to let bygones be bygones.” He removed his cigar from his mouth to take a swig of whiskey from a tin canteen.
Skaggs turned to look, so Duff could no longer ignore the swine. He did not extend his hand.
“That is,” Fatty continued, “as long as you stop jewing me on the trades. From here on out, I’ll take your dollar for ninety-eight of my pennies.”
Duff simply turned back to Skaggs.
“Well, this,” Skaggs said to Duff with a smile, “exactly this single-minded concern with copper and gold, is, I believe, what your magazine writer meant by ‘materialism.’”
“Saaay what?” Fatty chuckled. “You’re a regular walking, talking encyclopedia, ain’t you?” He offered his little canteen. “Care for a taste of the spirits, Professor?”
Skaggs took a polite sip.
“And congratulations, Lucking,” Fatty said, “on saving Mrs. Swan’s flash-house from burning out completely. You and your boys’ll be in line for your gratuities from those ladies, huh?” He grinned, then pinched each of his jowls with thumb and forefinger and rapidly pushed and pulled the flesh of both cheeks at once, rhythmically, to produce a squishy noise meant to resemble the sound of fucking. His b’hoys snickered. When he finished, he cackled and punched at Duff ’s shoulder in a jovial fashion—but Duff grabbed Fatty’s wrist hard before he could withdraw it.
“You aim to go at it right here in the street, do you, Lucking? Have our knock-down and drag-out?”
“Hey,” Skaggs said, “no, no—no need for a fracas.” He had been caught in the middle of street brawls between fire companies before, and during a melee last year had a whole box of exposed plates smashed and ruined. He put his hand on Duff ’s other shoulder. It was five more seconds before Duff released Fatty’s wrist.
“Do not bother that girl again,” he said to Freeborn. “Priscilla Christmas. Stay clear of her.” His scar stung.
“Why, I never heard her right name before. Thank you, Mr. Lucking. That is, if you and me is talking about the same chicken. From right over here in Mercer Street, the skinny schoolmaid cunt?”
“Damn you, Freeborn, keep your rotten ugly ideas in your own mucky head! Miss Christmas is a friend of my sister’s!”
Fatty grinned again. “Uh-huh. Yeah. Riiiiight.” He turned to go.
Skaggs squeezed Duff ’s shoulder harder, trying to hold him in place.
“Oh,” Fatty said, swiveling his head as he remembered something. “Me and one of my bubs, Toby here, happened to see your sister perform last month.”
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br /> Toby giggled. Duff turned away and walked toward his machine and his men.
“Onstage, you know?” Fatty said a little louder.
Duff was blind with rage. He kept walking.
“At Heilperin’s,” Fatty shouted, “the art studio in the Bowery! We thought she was prime, Lucking. Prime!”
Skaggs shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and shook his head.
Duff Lucking did nothing, did not turn or stop or talk back. But he felt that he was about to explode, as if ten pounds of black powder were packed into his skull in place of brains, and the hot scar on his cheek was a curlicue two-inch fuse. He imagined the wreckage his bomb head would produce as an aerial charge five or six feet above the ground. (The shattered window glass alone! In Mexico there had been next to no glass to shatter.) He imagined the thousands of people for a mile around who would stop what they were doing for a moment and frown and wonder what on earth that had been.
POLLY LUCKING WOULD have felt the blast, might have even seen bits of flying debris erupting into the sky. As it was, she had smelled the fire burning. She sat 250 yards away, in the privy behind 101 Mercer, craning her neck to peek out through the vent at the backs of the two buildings in Greene Street that abutted Mrs. Stanhope’s. She watched a man lugging ten-gallon canisters into the backyard of the bakery.
The other building, No. 94, was the rich widow Gibbs’s old house. The draperies on its tall rear windows were open. Polly had never been able to see inside the house so well. Through the middle window she could see a painting of an old man with long, curly white hair. The portrait, of President John Adams, had been commissioned by Mrs. Gibbs’s late husband and painted from life. Polly amused herself admiring the old fellow’s likeness to Prosper Skyring. Skyring was currently dressing upstairs in Three South, having just completed his hour of bliss with Polly.
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