by Peter Quinn
Cassidy ordered another round of whiskeys. He handed the Gallagher brothers their glasses and stepped aside so Dunne could pay.
“We aren’t the people we once were, no doubt of that,” Cassidy said, “a nation of poets, warriors, and priests, our royalty showing through our rags, the most ancient race of Europe, our country conquered by the treachery of an English-speaking rabble but our souls and spirits free. What have we become? Just look around. A broken, dispirited, anonymous mob of pleasure seekers cowed by the likes of Robert Noonan, that lickspittle calls himself a provost marshal, the greatest traitor of the day!”
“We still have men like Morrissey,” Dunne said.
“Thank God for it,” Cassidy said, rapping his knuckles on the bar.
“None can cow him.”
“The man hasn’t been born yet.”
“Nor show him disrespect.”
“None.”
“Nor dare to cheat him.”
Cassidy took his drink in one gulp and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Well, some have tried, no doubt, but paid the price.”
Dunne ordered another round. “Always a price to pay for crossing John Morrissey,” he said.
“Always.”
“Seems to me only a fool would take the risk.” Dunne passed around the drinks.
“’Tis true, but such are always in abundance, especially in New York, the mecca of fools everywhere.”
The Gallagher brothers took their drinks without removing their eyes from the stage. Three waiter girls were singing a soft melody. The words were inaudible; every few minutes, as they bent at the waist and the low cut of their blouses practically exposed their breasts, a cheer went up.
Cassidy leaned close to Dunne, and seeming to forget that it was only the Gallaghers who might overhear (and couldn’t anyway), whispered to him, “They aren’t hard to find, the kind of fools you spoke about; indeed, you need go no farther than these premises: One of the cabal of the rat-noses that owns this place is as big a fool as God makes and has traded away his future at the faro table. Morrissey is breathing down his neck for payment, a hot and discomforting breath it must be.”
“Is he a gentleman?”
Cassidy laughed. “A crude hayseed of a Yankee is what he is, an original apple-knocker from some upstate backwater, one of those crossroads calls itself a town. Made a bundle on Wall Street and, from what I hear, lost it too, and is now in danger of losing more precious things, like life and limb.”
“And he owns the Trump?”
“A part. He was the one brought in the spectacle of the lovely Anatid, a sight even Barnum can’t match. The Trump was just another concert saloon until Halsey came up with the notion of offering private viewings of the Swan, found her, too, a girl worth ogling. A pimp’s work, but the house rewarded him with a proprietary interest in the place since it was him who raised it to prominence.”
“Halsey know the danger he’s in?” Dunne asked.
“Does the mouse fear the cat? The man may be a speculator and pimp, but he’s got ears and eyes. He knows what Morrissey will do to a welsher and knows too that when his luck was running high and the cards running his way, he boasted about putting Morrissey out of business and taking the faro palace away from him. Morrissey will never forget the slight. He’ll do to Halsey what Achilles did to Hector, not just destroy him but subject his fallen form to shameful outrage.”
Cassidy called for more drinks. Dunne turned and watched the stage. A line of waiter girls were kicking their legs. He wouldn’t press Cassidy any further. He had what he was after. A lead. Halsey. Didn’t sound like Capshaw’s gentleman visitor, but it was a place to start.
The waiter girls moved back and forth across the stage, their arms locked together, an identical half-moon smile on each face.
A waiter girl came up beside the Gallagher brothers. “Would you like to see the Swan?” she said. Neither of the brothers looked at her.
“How about One-Eyed Jack?” she said.
“Little need have I of such foolishness,” Cassidy said.
“You’d come sure enough if you could get someone else to pay. How about your friend here? Maybe he’d like a view and will take you along.”
Dunne shook his head, turned, and paid for the last round of drinks. He felt beyond such boy’s stuff, peeking through holes at a naked woman. Look but don’t touch. He wasn’t averse to the pleasures the likes of Anna O’Brien could offer, but in his heart was a desire he never spoke about, a desire few denizens of the Bowery or the Five Points ever seemed to think about, a desire for what seemed out of reach, not merely a woman, but a wife, children, a home. Lying abed at night in the cold, damp darkness of the New-York Orphan Asylum, he had thought of that warm and distant world, closed his eyes, and tried to keep it there until the occasional coughing from the other beds, the sleepers’ cries for mothers who would never come, the sound of the whistles on the river, night noises, distinct and lonely, drew him back to where he was.
He had his first woman when he was fourteen. Been out of the orphanage almost two years. Left one day on a scow, hidden beneath a canvas tarp, landed in Manhattan, gone back to the old neighborhood he had been taken from six years before, when his mother died of cholera. Ran with a pack of Paddy urchins like himself till he landed in the arms of a Municipal and was hauled before a rat-nosed judge.
“Mr. Dunleavy,” said the judge staring down at him, “you have committed a theft while riding a public conveyance. You deserve to go to jail.” The judge glanced at a tall somber man who stood at the side of the bench. “What do you think, Mr. Scott?”
“I think what I have always thought, Your Honor,” Mr. Scott said. “It is a waste to send a boy such as this—and despite his crime, that is what he is, a boy—to a penal institution in which he will be further schooled in criminal depravity. What boys like this one need are Christian homes free of superstition, ignorance, and drunkenness. In the proper setting, surrounded by habits of thrift, piety, and honesty, divorced from the influences that have misshapen them, it is possible they may one day grow into mechanics, farmers, taxpayers.”
“I doubt it, Mr. Scott. In my experience, few things short of hanging can change the direction of a youth set out on a life of crime. His is invariably a felon’s doom. But if the Children’s Aid Society promises that this criminal will be removed to a distance not less than a thousand miles from this city, I will consent to put him in your custody.”
“Your Honor, I cannot promise the distance to which he will be removed, but I can aver that as we have done with a myriad of his ilk, the Society will provide this boy with the chance for a new and productive life.”
Jimmy Dunne left in autumn, part of a company of forty-three boys and girls. He was among the oldest, the majority being between the ages of six and ten. Jimmy was brought by Mr. Scott from jail to the Hudson River pier on the morning of the departure. The agent in charge was the Reverend Edgar Potts, a visitor of the Society, who was assisted by two matrons. He had the children line up in rows. He searched the clothes and sacks of the boys, the matrons those of the girls. They confiscated scapulars, rosary beads, religious medals, several knives, and a small vial of gin. Each child was then given a Bible. “This is the greatest protection and comfort you will have on our journey,” Mr. Potts said. “Cling to it.” He told them to kneel, and said a prayer over them. The boy kneeling next to Jimmy was small and frail. He was clothed in a silver-buttoned tunic several sizes too big for him. “O Holy Mother of God,” he said over and over again in a thin voice, “we’re going to Kansas, and the Indians will eat us.”
They traveled up the Hudson overnight. Mr. Potts locked the older boys and girls in a cabin. Most of the children were Paddies, but there was a contingent of Germans who spoke to one another in their own language until Mr. Potts forbade any conversations except in English. In Albany they were given breakfast and put aboard a train for Buffalo. For many of the children it was their first trip on the rails, and there was an air of
excitement as they got aboard. But Jimmy and the older children were locked in a windowless baggage car, and their excitement soon turned to tedium. In Buffalo they boarded another boat. By now the novelty of the trip had disappeared for everyone. The little children were crying constantly, and the older ones were sullen and withdrawn. Mr. Potts and the matrons were rarely to be seen. They arrived in Detroit before dawn, walked through dark, empty streets to another rail station, and climbed onto a train for what seemed an endless journey through great forests that gradually gave way to a flat, treeless land. At several stops, Mr. Potts and the matrons removed small groups of children to a nearby church or hall. Mr. Potts invariably carried one of the little ones in his arms, tousling his hair, hugging him, making it seem as if such playfulness were a usual part of their relationship.
A crowd gathered at each place, farmers and their wives waiting in their wagons until the children appeared. They looked the children over the way they would a horse, examining teeth, feeling limbs, turning heads this way and that. “Good children all,” Mr. Potts said each time. “I’ve come to know every one of them in special ways. I envy your chance to suffer these little children to come unto you.”
The older children were no longer kept under lock and key. Jimmy sat by the window of the rocking railway car as it traveled across open country, the land brown and flat, rolling waves of grass beneath a sky that curved down to meet the ground at what seemed a continent’s distance away. Jimmy was part of the next-to-the-last contingent of children to be given away. They left the train and walked down a street flanked by a dozen or so wooden buildings, a small interruption on the dull, uniform terrain. It was as remote and lonely as any place Jimmy had ever imagined. They were lodged in what looked like a church, but a church without an altar or statues or decorations, just a pulpit and pews. It seemed to match the territory in its plain and unforgiving appearance. Mr. Potts and the matrons left them in the church and went to stay two doors away, in a hotel. The wind blew hard all night and carried the high moan of animal noises, wolves or coyotes or whatever was about, and the small boy who had knelt next to Jimmy on the Hudson River pier sobbed himself to sleep.
The next morning Mr. Potts roused them early. They washed at a pump behind the church, and each child was dressed in a clean shirt. About noon they were lined up in front of the pulpit, and the matrons opened the rear doors. People filled the church, couples mostly, some with their own children. Mr. Potts gave his standard talk from the pulpit, at one point reaching down to put his hand on Jimmy’s head. “Good children all,” he said, “perhaps not blessed with the intellectual gifts of our American youth but capable of being molded into men and women of industriousness and obedience.” Jimmy studied the hard, weathered faces of the crowd, thin-lipped wives and husbands with skin the sun had tarnished the same color as prairie grass. Their clothes hung loosely on their frames, drab coats and washed-out dresses covered with a film of dust. They looked to Jimmy like the inhabitants of the poorhouse who were brought periodically to sweep and clean the grounds of the New-York Orphan Asylum: grim, silent, in need of a good meal.
When Mr. Potts was finished with his speech, the people left their pews and crowded around. A man with a fringe of beard around his face came up and looked in Jimmy’s ears, poked him in the ribs and chest. Jimmy pushed the man’s finger away.
“There, there,” Mr. Potts said as he took Jimmy by the neck. “Let’s not allow the rigors of our long journey to cause in us an uncharacteristic outburst of ill temper.” He ruffled Jimmy’s hair. “He’s a fine boy, for sure, just brimming with ambition!”
The small boy from the pier was led away by a gray-haired woman. Halfway up the aisle he tried to run back to the other children. The woman grabbed one arm, a matron the other. They dragged him screaming from the church. The man who had poked Jimmy took Mr. Potts aside. They had an animated conversation that Jimmy caught only snatches of: “one of the strongest”… “not to be given away.” They stepped outside. Jimmy watched them through the window of the church. The man reached into his pocket and handed something to Mr. Potts, who quickly stuffed it in his coat. As soon as they came back in, the man strode over to Jimmy. “Boy,” he said, “come with me.”
“Dunleavy,” Mr. Potts said, “this is Mr. Ellingwood. He is offering you the refuge of a Christian home. Go now, in true gratitude and with true determination to make something of yourself.”
Ellingwood said, “Ain’t got all day. Come on.”
Another couple had selected an eight-year-old girl and were leading her away. She was screaming and crying, begging not to be separated from her younger sisters, three-year-old twins who stood in quiet amazement at the commotion. The matrons helped remove the older sister.
Jimmy walked outside with Ellingwood. The wind was rising again, rippling across the sea of grass and spraying the churchyard with dust. Jimmy got up next to Ellingwood on the creaking seat of an old wagon.
“That all yer got?” Ellingwood said. He pointed at the canvas bag in which Jimmy carried the shirt he had worn on the journey, a pair of extra trousers, a bar of soap, and the Bible that he, like the other children, had been issued.
“Yes.”
“Ain’t got a hat?”
“Nope.”
Ellingwood shook his head. “City folk,” he said. “A grasshopper got more sense.” He snapped the reins, and they drove off across the prairie under a sky that was rapidly becoming gray and stormy. Jimmy looked back at the town. Lights glowed in the windows. He fought the urge to jump out of the wagon and run toward them.
It was pitch-dark before they reached Ellingwood’s homestead. Ellingwood went in first. “Watch yer step,” he said to Jimmy. He stepped down to a dirt floor two feet below the threshold. Ellingwood’s home was a one-room sod house. A bench ran along one wall; there was a table in front of it. In the far corner was a sagging bed and a cupboard. The stove, which was beside the door, was glowing red.
“I got us a boy,” Ellingwood said as he entered.
“Praise God,” said a voice over by the bed. A woman stepped forward into the light. She was thin and small. Her hair was parted in the middle and drawn back from a round, pretty face. She wore a faded plaid dress that was buttoned to the neck and had a tattered red towel tucked into her belt like an apron. “Let’s see.”
Ellingwood led Jimmy to the center of the room. “Ain’t exactly Samson come back to life, but he’s got two hands and two legs and seems fit enough. Name is Jim.”
“Well, Jim,” she said, “how about something to eat?”
Jimmy watched her at the stove. She moved with a quick, lively step and sang to herself. She seemed to be about twenty or so, at least a decade younger than Ellingwood, and had none of his sourness. She served them a dinner of coffee, beans, potatoes, and salted buffalo meat. They ate in silence. When dinner was over, Ellingwood took a lantern and a blanket and led Jimmy to the shed attached to the side of the house. Amid a clutter of farm implements was a wooden bunk.
“This is where you’ll stay,” Ellingwood said. “Be careful not to break nothing.”
Next morning, Ellingwood woke Jimmy before dawn. They had a meal of beans and coffee. Ellingwood gave Jimmy a thick woolen coat that came to below his knees and a fur hat with ear patches sewn on. “Weather is crazy this time of year,” he said. “Ain’t telling how fast winter will be on us.” They rode in the rickety wagon across the prairie until they reached a railroad track. Ellingwood drove beside the track for some distance, not telling Jimmy where they were headed. The day was surprisingly hot. Jimmy’s nostrils filled with a sickening smell before Ellingwood stopped the wagon. “Here we are,” he said.
Across the prairie in front of them were thousands of animal carcasses, some little more than skeletons, others swelling masses of decaying, putrid flesh. “This is where the buffalo cross the tracks,” Ellingwood said. “Trains get forced to sit here until the herds are past, so to make the time go faster the passengers take target practice on t
he beasts.” He handed Jimmy a burlap sack. “Everythin’ is left behind for the pickin’, fur, meat, and bones, tons of ’em. Bring a good price as fertilizer at any railway station.” Jimmy worked all morning at collecting bones, a rag soaked in cottonseed oil tied across his face to keep out the terrible odor. Toward late afternoon, a strong wind came up and the sky clouded over. Ellingwood tied the horses to the track. He and Jimmy lay beneath the wagon as a barrage of hailstones beat hard on the planks above. In a short time, the sky cleared and the day turned warm again.
They worked at bone-gathering all that week. On Sunday, Ellingwood hitched up the wagon. Mrs. Ellingwood sat next to her husband; Jimmy on the floor in the rear.
“We’re goin’ to church,” Ellingwood said.
“I won’t say no Protestant prayers,” Jimmy said. In the orphanage, the Catholic children, who were 90 percent of the inmates, had stood with their arms folded during the compulsory prayer services. The little ones followed the lead of the big ones, who remembered the admonition of mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, the people of the neighborhood: Don’t give in to the rat-noses’ ways. Don’t let them take away the faith. Jimmy’s dim memories of his mother were mostly of her praying, saying her beads, him kneeling next to her in St. Mary’s on Grand Street, the soft, repetitive murmur of the Hail Mary. Little of the faith had he learned since. Mass heard amid a crowd of boys packed into the rear vestibule of a church. More a social gathering than anything else. In the orphanage, a priest visited them every month and said Mass. “Your people have suffered for the faith,” he said each time in his sermon. “They tried to starve us out of it in Ireland and shame us out of it here in America. But we’ve never allowed ourselves to be separated from it, not then, not now, not ever.”