Table Money

by Jimmy Breslin

  In the morning, the Italian still would not move. Morrison said to him, “I’d like to be doing the same t’ing.” When Morrison returned that night, the Italian’s dark eyes were coated. His breath noisily sought cracks in caked lungs. Touching the Italian’s forehead, Morrison felt a high turf fire. He went to the camp office to get a doctor. But as it was after six o’clock, only one person was in the office. A fat man armed with a shotgun blocked the door. When Morrison said he wanted to report illness, the guard stepped aside and allowed him to enter. The person at the desk, a rangy man with snowy hair, looked up quickly.

  “Don’t come too close to me,” he said. Frozen blue eyes inspected the dirt on Morrison. “The doctor went home for the night. Be back first thing tomorrow morning,” the man said. His eyes returned to his papers.

  “I’ll go get the doctor,” Morrison said.

  “Oh no you won’t,” the clerk said. “He lives all the way into Beacon.”

  “Is that far?” Morrison said.

  “Too far for you,” the clerk said. He stood up. He was a full six inches taller than Morrison. “I’ll give you something that will get the man through the night,” the clerk said. He went to the closet and brought out a heavy gray blanket. “The sick rate some concern,” he said, handing the blanket to Morrison and dismissing him at the same time.

  At the door, Morrison turned around and said, “I’d like to thank you by name.”

  “I’m Mr. Frayer.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Frayer.”

  The clerk went back to his papers. Morrison went to the hut and placed the blanket over the young Italian, who was barely conscious and unable to respond to soft word or touch. Throughout the night the Italian wheezed and intermittently gasped. Once, a huge black got up cursing and padded over to the Italian’s bed. He grasped the Italian’s nose between his fingers.

  “I got to teach this mon how to breathe.”

  “Your mon here is sick,” Morrison said, his accent as thick as the black’s, each with the heritage of colonization by the same harsh-accented people from northern England.

  “Let him be sick by hisself,” the black said, still holding the nose. “He makes me wake up.”

  Morrison swung out of bed and pulled the black’s hand off the nose. For a moment, the two stood on either side of the bunk and speculated on the outcome of a fight. Then both stepped back in the darkness and flopped back in their bunks, which had grown cold in the night air. Morrison fell asleep to the Italian’s irregular wheezing. Awakened at dawn for work in the tunnel, Morrison hurriedly said to the Italian, “The doctor should be here any minute.” Then he went outside and caught the horse wagon for the mine.

  When he returned later that day, the bunk was empty. Got him into a hospital, Morrison said to himself. After dinner he walked to the office, stood in the doorway, and called in to Frayer, “How is my mon?”

  “Who?” Frayer said, not looking up.

  “The Eyetalian.”

  “Oh. Poor boy died today. It was too late by the time the doctor saw him. The boy was dead by noon, they tell me.”

  “Is it after telling me that he’d be here sooner than the sun?”

  “He arrived at his usual time. First thing after he finished rounds of his own patients. At least that’s what I’m told. I wasn’t here, of course; I was home in bed as all this was happening. I sleep during the day. Now I must tend to my work all night.” With a wave he dismissed Morrison.

  Outside, Morrison went to the front gate where two armed men sat in front of a fire.

  “Where’s a pub?” he asked.

  “Two miles down.”

  “That’s for me,” Morrison said.

  “You sure can’t go,” the guards said.

  “You can be full sure I will.”

  “Not while we’re here. None of you can leave the camp at night.”

  Morrison walked through the dark toward his hut, then simply strolled off into the woods and came out on a road that, after he had walked fast for several minutes, brought him to a crossroads, on one corner of which sat a low building with amber gas lamps in the windows and a sign advertising whiskey. Inside, two men sat at the small wooden bar, which was tended by a young woman whose ease in her surroundings indicated that she probably was the owner’s daughter.

  “Stand back ye,” she said, both hands waving, as Morrison approached.

  “I’ll only be havin’ a pint.”

  “Not here you won’t. Back off now.”

  For the first time in his young life, Morrison’s feet were uncertain on a barroom floor.

  “We serve no tunnel workers,” the barmaid said. “Please get out. You’ll bring us Fenian bugs all around.”

  “I’m a bug, am I?” Morrison said.

  “You carry bugs. You Fenians go down in the tunnel and come out covered with bugs. Roaches. You brought roaches to every house in Beacon. We never had a roach in Beacon until you Fenians came. You’re just dirty people who don’t mind being covered with roaches. Well, you can’t stay here. It’s against the law for you people to be out of the camp anyway.”

  “Law?” Morrison said.

  “We had to start a police force around here to keep the lot of you away from the town,” she said. “Now be off!” Her voice rose to a shriek.

  Morrison left and stood outside for a moment. He saw lights in the distance through the woods and he walked toward them. Soon he was on the first streets of Beacon, hard dirt streets lined with clapboard houses, the dirt streets turning into cobblestones and the houses into shops in the downtown part. Morrison walked through shadows with his eyes searching for a light that would indicate a saloon.

  “Here now.”

  Two men were standing under a streetlamp. Morrison glanced at them and started to walk on, but then he saw one of them raise a rifle.

  “Stand fast, scum,” the man said.

  Now Morrison saw that the two of them wore silver badges.

  “You’re from the water tunnel?” the one holding the gun said.

  “I don’t know,” Morrison said.

  “Why, I know by looking at the dirt caked all over you,” the gun man said. “Don’t you know it’s against the law for you people to be in this town? Stand clear of me, covered with mud like you are.”

  Morrison was thrown in the back of a wagon, and the two Beacon cops drove him to the camp, where the night clerk, Frayer, came to the office doorway, his thin lips arranged in a snarl. One arm was kept inside the doorway. “You were specifically told by the gate guards that you were not to leave this camp!” he shouted at Morrison. “It’s bad enough that I must sit here exposed to your bugs. Now you’ve walked through my town. God knows how many roaches you’ve left. Maybe on the very street where I live.”

  As Morrison started to walk away, he heard the noise coming through the air behind him and he wanted to throw himself to the ground, but the most he could do was duck his head as Frayer’s bullwhip shrieked and struck his back, shredding the jacket and the shirt under it. Morrison’s body jerked straight, and he howled into the black night sky. The whip whirred through the air again and tore at his back. He went black with pain and stumbled away, but now the whip came again between his shoulder blades and onto the back of his neck and he threw his hands into the air, reaching for God’s help, for he could not endure the pain.

  They carried him to his hut and threw him in front of it. Dazed and whimpering, he clung to a tree outside the hut as the pain stung his shredded back. Finally, he made it into his bunk, where he rolled in torment throughout the night. It was not until the afternoon that somebody pointed Morrison out to the doctor, who came over and swabbed and bandaged his back. Six days later, Morrison was able to walk out of the hut. It was morning and he was wearing his new shirt from Derry; his work clothes had been torn to bits by Frayer’s whipping. Shivering, he watched as Frayer left the office at the end of his overnight stint and rode off in a brougham. Morrison then walked into the office and told the day clerk on duty
that he had promised Frayer that he would do personal work on his house in Beacon, but that he had misplaced the address.

  “Has he gone mad?” the day clerk said. “You’ll leave Fenian bugs all over his house.”

  “He told me to take a shower first,” Morrison said. “We understand each other now.”

  “I guess you sure should,” the day clerk said. “Harry Frayer lives at Fifteen Selby Street. Yellow house, two in from the corner of Haymarket.”

  “I’ll use the shower,” Morrison said.

  He walked through the gates, left unguarded by day, and went into Beacon and found Frayer’s house. The front door was unlocked and Morrison slid in, listened for house noises and heard none, and then crawled upstairs. Frayer was asleep on his back in a bedroom dark from thick-draped windows. He had a shotgun next to him on the far side of the bed. Morrison thought that if he tiptoed to the bed, the wood might squeak and awaken Frayer, who would grab for the shotgun. Morrison thought about rushing the bed, but felt this noise, too, would wake up Frayer in time to grab for the shotgun. Morrison tiptoed downstairs and started a roaring log fire on the wood floor in front of the living room fireplace. He went into the kitchen and started a second log fire on the floor alongside the stove. Morrison left the house on a dead run, the fire’s first crackling sounding behind him. He had no idea whether Frayer lived or died in the fire. Either way, that’s the last time that whore’s get will be whipping somebody. He went to the railroad station and, using the last of his money from Ireland, bought a ticket to New York.

  Morrison fell asleep with his face pressed against the window. He awoke as the steam train was inside the tunnel under Park Avenue. When he arrived at Grand Central Station, his eyes were dazzled by the crowds of men in rich overcoats who strode through the pale, smoky light coming from glass panes hundreds of feet overhead. Morrison went downtown by trolley and found his sister on Mulberry Street. Morrison told her about Frayer from Beacon. “Maybe I didn’t kill him,” Morrison said with eyes that were fairly exploding with hope.

  “Maybe he died and they’ll come hang you,” the sister said.

  “You best loan me some money and I’ll take the boat home,” Morrison said.

  “I loaned you money to get here,” the sister said. “You’ll have me goin’ without food now.”

  “Then I stay here and risk my neck,” Morrison said.

  He walked the streets of the Five Points neighborhood until a bar owner named Divers, who was from the town of Muff, in Donegal, hired him as a bar boy. The owner’s last name, and the town he was from, a small village stuck into a hill above Loch Foyle, created much schoolboy humor in the barroom. Morrison, fearful that each stranger walking in was a policeman from Beacon, spent most of his time ducking his head under the bar, arranging bottles on shelves. “He’s a muff-diver all right,” the customers shrieked as they saw Morrison’s head disappearing. At first, Morrison didn’t understand what it meant. When he did, he was vaulting over the bar to defend his honor so often that he wound up with the face of an old tomcat.

  At the same time, his insides winced every time he thought of his possible murder of Frayer up at Beacon. He dared not confess the act, as he thought the priest, as penance, would command him to face the authorities. Occasionally Morrison had to receive communion, a sacrament for those purified by confession, lest all in church stare at him and then whisper furiously to each other that he had committed some monstrous sin that prevented him from walking up to the rail and receiving the Lord’s body. Therefore, Morrison now and then made a bad communion, which is perhaps the darkest act of all.

  Late one spring night, a few days after making a bad communion at Easter, Morrison was morosely mopping the saloon floor after closing hours. A waitress named Annie sat in the darkness in the table area and sobbed. Morrison walked over and sat down with her. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I’m pregnant,” she cried.

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “I’ve no husband.”

  “Well, did you tell the boy?”

  Annie’s voice rose to a full wail. “I can’t find him.”

  “When is this baby coming?”

  Annie pulled her sweater up and showed a bulge. “The doctor says I’m five months gone.”

  “Why did you wait so long?” Morrison said.

  “I thought it would go away if I didn’t look at it,” Annie said. She dissolved in tears.

  “Stop crying,” Morrison said. “I’ll marry you.”

  She looked up in astonishment.

  “Meet me at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning in front of City Hall and we’ll buy a marriage license. Now stop crying. I’ve got to be about my work,” Morrison said.

  The next day Annie stood in front of City Hall, certain the bar boy would not show. But at eleven o’clock, his smile as good as his word, Johnny Morrison skipped up, grabbed her hand, and led her to the marriage clerk’s office. They were married on a Wednesday in St. James’ Church by a priest who saw that the bride had her future well in front of her by now, and therefore he gazed only at her face to avoid embarrassment for all. Four months to the day and hour later, she gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Jean.

  Annie clutched the baby in her hospital bed and looked up at Morrison and thought of him as totally heroic. Johnny, who had trouble standing still for more than a few moments in such circumstances, went for a walk. His sister Florence remained.

  “I have to say to you,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Annie said.

  “That his heart is good but it also wanders.”

  “He’s young,” Annie said.

  “He’s part of this family. Jesus, there’s not a one of them ever behaved.”

  “The drink,” Annie said.

  “Oh, they can’t get enough of it. Then they disappear. They’re great, but they’re not reliable.”

  “How can you be talking? You’re one of them.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you. They drink and then they disappear either with a woman or with more drink. Who knows it better than me?”

  Florence Morrison was telling the truth. By now, she was married to a man named O’Gara, who had a grocery store over in the Chelsea section. Waiting for her downstairs in the hospital lobby was a cheap but thoroughly enjoyable horse bookmaker from Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, with whom she intended to spend the afternoon while her husband was busy selling cold cuts and potato salad.

  Pacing in the hallway, Johnny Morrison, new father, was assessing his fortunes. First, his soul felt cleansed; by marrying Annie and saving her daughter from a life of illegitimacy, he had made amends, just in case the night clerk Frayer actually had been killed in Beacon. Furthermore, as Annie had not been a virgin upon their marriage night, he was entitled to snuggle with women whenever his chase was successful. Had she known this as she lay in her bed with her baby on this day, rather than idolize him, she would have wished upon Johnny Morrison some form of torture.

  Annie took her daughter home to rooms on Catherine Street and Johnny Morrison blew down the streets like a bright cloud. He was generally ecstatic, because he was in love with several women, and at home he had a wife who cared for him very much, and who had been told of the Morrisons’ habits but had neglected to retain the lecture. Instead Annie thought the marriage was composed of kind notes. Meanwhile, Johnny Morrison managed saloons and, deep in the night, while drinking so much that his legs buckled, he kept hearing the sound of a wagon, but in his mind he changed this to a gay pony trap, pony festooned with ribbons, the back seat of the trap taken up by a large jug of taus an puta, which is the top of the home-distilled whiskey, the moonshine, the first whiskey through the copper tubing and thus of such strength that Johnny could drink it in the heart of winter and look at a snowbank and see flowers.

  He laughed one night when he heard the rumble of a wagon outside the saloon on Fulton Street and then, looking out the window, saw a garbage wagon going by slowly. “Be off with y
ou,” Johnny said, waving in disdain. To prove he had no fear, he walked home that night in the middle of the street. When nothing happened to him the next day, he proclaimed the old story out of Donegal was a lie. As he drank, the whiskey turned to cement inside his liver.

  He and Annie had had a son, Kevin, born in 1872. Added responsibility meant added whiskey; the hardened liver now slowed every part of his body except the glass hand, which moved so swiftly that Johnny always appeared to be in a rowing race. Of course, by 1880, at age thirty-two, he turned as yellow as a crocus and was buried in Yorkville. He had not been around long enough even to leave dreams.

  Annie Morrison came back from the cemetery to her rooms on Catherine Street, put her black veil on the dresser, looked at her son and daughter and wondered what they were thinking of, how they saw their tragedy, and then she knew it was time to look ahead; there was no food for dinner on this same night. There wasn’t a dollar in the house. At the funeral, several bar owners and bartenders had been generous in offers of buying drinks for the bereaved family, but all fled at the suggestion that more substantive assistance was needed.

  Her sister-in-law, Florence Morrison, by now a mother of three, and firmly attached to O’Gara’s grocery store and its world, knew enough to bring food, and later paid the rent a couple of times. She helped Annie get a job at her old trade, saloon waitress. The children went to bed early each night and the mother went to a saloon until dawn. Her short but tiring years, and the grief they had brought with them, had weakened Annie’s underpinnings so much so that on many nights she simply had neither interior spirit nor legs free enough of pain to allow her to work. She began losing jobs.

  One day, Florence took the daughter Jean far uptown, to a great stone mansion on the corner of 69th and Fifth, a place with a wrought iron fence and a gate in front of a high stoop that led to a doorway lit by lamps. It belonged to a family named Bigelow. Florence Morrison stood in front for a moment, checked the address on the slip of paper in her hand, and then walked Jean around to the back. She banged on a door on the side of a high stoop. A young boy, fourteen perhaps, hair falling into his face, looked out.