The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  “Have you talked to General Sanford?” Noonan asked.

  “A home-grown McClellan,” Brown said. “Be content to let the city be reduced to a smoking ruin as long as the state arsenals are safe and secure.”

  “Wool has put him in command.”

  “I’ve known old Wooly longer than I care to remember. A stuffed and blustery turkey-cock. Should have left the service after the Mexican War, but I doubt even he’s dull enough to endorse Sanford’s inane instructions.”

  “Tread lightly with Wool,” Noonan said. “Bring him around by argument. He’ll listen. What he won’t abide is any challenge to his authority. His feathers are easily ruffled.”

  “Damn him and damn his feathers! There isn’t time for such silliness!”

  Noonan conferred with Acton and Brown for over an hour. He walked back to Leonard Street without incident and supervised the storing of the last load of records from the district offices. He was about to set out again for Police Headquarters when an officer arrived with orders for him to report immediately to General Wool’s suite at the St. Nicholas. The General’s carriage awaited Noonan in the street, along with a troop of cavalry.

  The officer escorted Noonan up the stairs of the hotel. They heard Wool’s voice as soon as they reached the top of the first landing, angry and impatient. The door to the suite was open. Inside, the main room was crammed with officers and civilians. The drapes were drawn, and a thick haze of tobacco smoke hung in the air. Wool sat in the corner, in a wing chair. Mayor Opdyke leaned on the chair, as if for support. General Brown stood in front of Wool, with Ahearn at his side.

  “Insubordination is a court-martial offense!” Wool shouted.

  “What kind of offense is it when the militia hides in its armories while mobs run amok?” Brown said. “Isn’t cowardice a greater offense than disobedience?”

  Wool pushed himself out of his chair. “Do I hear you right? Are you calling me a coward?”

  “General Sanford’s defense of the state armories is so ill advised that it exposes us all to such an accusation!”

  “Impudence, Brown! It’s in your tone and in your words!”

  “Put the federal troops in this city under my command or a day from now it is the rabble and its leaders who will be sitting here debating how to divide their spoils.”

  Drops of perspiration beaded on Wool’s nose and dropped onto his uniform. “Insubordination, Brown! I will not abide it!” He turned to an adjutant. “Where’s Noonan? Goddamn him!”

  The Mayor pointed at Noonan in the doorway. “He’s right there!”

  “Noonan, get in here,” Wool said. “I’m relieving General Brown of his command. You’re in charge of the federal forces in this city now.”

  “General Brown is a career officer,” Noonan said. “His experience and knowledge are far ahead of mine. I think the plan he is already following has much to recommend it.”

  “Who asked you what you think, Colonel? You’ll report to General Sanford immediately. Do whatever he says.” Wool sank back in his chair. “Now get out of my sight, the lot of you!”

  Brown and Ahearn were waiting for Noonan in the lobby. “The old fool,” Brown said. “If Sanford has his way, the city will be lost.”

  “I’ve no intention of taking command. I meant what I said in there. You are the proper man. Let Wool calm down, then apologize. In the interim, go about your work. I won’t interfere. When you’ve made your peace with Wool, keep doing the same.”

  “I haven’t the stomach to ask his pardon.”

  “Have you the stomach to see New York reduced to a smoking ruin ruled by mobs?”

  “Perhaps not,” Brown said. He walked away without another word.

  Ahearn leaned on his sword as if it were a walking stick. “They were talking about us before I arrived,” he said. “I heard them as we came down the corridor. ‘Can the Paddies be trusted to fight their own kind?’ someone asked. ‘Aye,’ another said, ‘remember how General Corcoran himself defied Governor Morgan and accepted a court-martial rather than march the Sixty-ninth in honor of the Prince of Wales.’”

  “You’ve already proved yourself,” Noonan said. “So have the Irish among the police and soldiers. We’ve nothing to apologize for. Wool knows that, as does Brown.”

  “The rioters are what the rat-noses will remember, not the soldiers or the police. They’re disgracing us all. God pity the ones come within my sight!”

  “Don’t be led by your passions, Ahearn. Fight with your head. If there’s any rule of warfare, it’s that.”

  “They’ll regret they ever started this,” Ahearn said. He shook hands with Noonan and limped down the hallway, a tall, stocky figure with a red beard, very different from the boy Noonan had first met on the road to Bull Run, a thin, smooth face above a spotless white collar and a blue military tunic with green epaulets; the uniform had been the gift of Ahearn’s father, who owned a small tavern in the lower part of Westchester. Ahearn had been expelled from the Jesuit college in Fordham after being found with a village girl in his room, an offense so serious that even the weeping and pleading of his father, and the offer of monetary atonement, could not win reinstatement.

  That day on the road from Centerville, Noonan rode at the back of the column, trying to keep the regimental supplies and baggage in order as the vast military procession turned into a hopeless tangle of troops, artillery, wagons, coaches, cavalry, and sightseers. Noonan did his best. He roped the commissary wagons together and had the superfluous baggage stacked on the side of the road, but when the firing sounded in the distance, the soldiers scrambled out of line, running forward to get a taste of the battle before the victory was won. And then the momentum reversed itself. There was panic everywhere. Soldiers ran headlong, tossing aside coats, caps, blankets, canteens, muskets, whatever threatened to slow their flight. Noonan formed a group of stragglers into a platoon. Somewhere up ahead were Corcoran and the Sixty-ninth, and he was determined to reach them. Suddenly, out of the smoke, a company of late arrivals came marching across a wheat field in parade-ground formation. They pushed aside the retreating soldiers, and the young lieutenant at their head marched right up to Noonan. “We’re here to reinforce the Sixty-ninth!” Ahearn announced in such a brash, confident tone that despite the chaos all around, Noonan burst out laughing.

  Ahearn served with the Irish Brigade through the Peninsula Campaign and at Antietam. At Fredericksburg, his legs were riddled with encased shot and the surgeons wanted to cut them off at the knees, but he drew his pistol and threatened to shoot the one who tried to put a saw to him. They lay him in a corner to die, but he recovered and within a month was up walking. Two years of war washed away his boyishness.

  Noonan went upstairs to the Provost Marshal’s room. He sat in the darkness. His mind filled with the faces of the men from those early days of the war. The camp at Fort Schuyler. Eager recruits. Discharged. Captured. Wounded. Dead. General Corcoran himself had been taken prisoner at Bull Run. Held almost a year in various Rebel dungeons before he was exchanged. Corcoran was a skeleton when he returned, his eyes at once fearful and hard, a condemned man’s look. The memory of the drummer boy’s brains that had been splattered across his face, temporarily blinding him. Strong, iron-muscled soldiers clutching their stomachs and crying for their mothers. The knowledge of victory’s brutal requirements.

  Noonan slept all night at his desk. An orderly woke him. He read the first telegrams of the morning. This would be another bloody, dreadful day. Wool summoned him after breakfast. The old man looked exhausted. “Brown has apologized,” he said. “I’ve returned him to his command.” He spoke in a soft voice. “I had hoped to end my career in an honorable way. But the Yorkers have put that hope to the sword. A rotten city and a rotten brood of murdering thugs and traitors that inhabit it. I wish them all damnation to hell.”

  In the early afternoon, General Brown sent two officers with an urgent message summoning Noonan to Police Headquarters. They traveled in a closed coach
. Brown was waiting for Noonan in the duty room. He drew Noonan in, closed the door, and sat behind his desk. “Ahearn is dead,” he said. “This morning, without informing me, he went back to his lodgings on the East Side to gather his belongings. He went alone. I suppose he meant to demonstrate his contempt for the rioters. He was jumped from behind and set upon by a mob, some of whom were his neighbors. They treated him in a manner that would make a savage blush. A priest brought what was left to the morgue in a wheelbarrow. I am ordering an escort to travel with you at all times.”

  “We’ve too few men to waste like that,” Noonan said.

  “I thought that would be your response, so I ask that you please look at this.” Brown opened the drawer of his desk, took out a thick brown envelope, and held it up. Scrawled across it in a crude, untutored hand was Noonan’s name and a single line beneath: TRAITER TO YOUR KIND. YOUR NEXT. Brown opened the envelope so that Noonan could see the contents. Inside was a human ear.

  “Mostly it’s the Negroes been treated this way,” the warden said as he lowered the sheet over Ahearn’s remains.

  On the way out, Noonan met Inspector John Murray of the Metropolitans. “There’s something I think you should see,” Murray said. He led Noonan into the room with the open coffins. A body, covered with a canvas tarp, lay in the corner. “We just brought this one in. Found him down on Second Avenue.” He pulled back the tarp. A blond-headed corpse lay frozen in death, its arms reaching up as if to catch something.

  Inspector Murray pointed at one of his hands. “Look at those nails, Colonel, all manicured and polished. And this shirt. Best quality. This was no ordinary workingman.” Murray reached down and tugged on the man’s trousers. Beneath the soiled outer pair was a clean white pair. “Ask me, we’re looking at the body of a Confederate agitator. We’ve numerous reports they’ve been seen rousing the crowds. This seems to confirm the fact.”

  “Perhaps. Or maybe he’s no more than a looter clad in some stolen clothes.”

  Noonan left the morgue and walked past his waiting carriage to the seawall beside the river. He smoked a cigarillo. The Unadilla, having circled Blackwells Island, steamed downriver, moving rapidly, the current now at its back. Noonan finished his smoke and threw the butt into the water amid a mess of sodden bits of paper, straw, and excrement. It bobbed upon the waves from the wake of the Unadilla, which slapped loudly against the seawall and, rebuked, slid back into the fast-moving waters and pulled the refuse along. Noonan said a prayer for Ahearn’s soul. Salve Regina, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.

  JULY 17, 1863

  Terrible is this place: It is the house of God, and the gate of heaven; and it shall be called the court of God.

  —Introit from the Mass in dedication of a church

  HIS IMAGE AND LIKENESS in the mirror: cassock draped on the emaciated frame like a coat on a scarecrow. Terriculum. A Latin word. Never been any good at that language. Enough to perform the sacred duties. But bits of what they had drilled into his head were still there. Terriculum: scarecrow.

  Decades ago, still a young man, he wore a coat very much like the one on the scarecrow in the yard behind the convent of the sisters who ran St. Joseph’s School; both were hand-me-downs from the students at the seminary. Could see that scarecrow from the sagging back stairs of the nuns’ house. Stood with hat in hand, yellow straw, hard and brittle, worn every season, same hat as the scarecrow’s and the slaves’. Suddenly, a face behind the tightly woven wire, black bonnet blending seamlessly into the darkness, her face floating in the air, disembodied, an image like one of those Roman women who appeared on holy cards, martyrs who went to some hideous death without fear or regret. Felicity, Per-petua, Agatha, Lucy.

  “Yes, Mr. Hughes, what is it?”

  “Mother Seton, I need your help.” The brim of the hat turning endlessly in his hands, round and round like a wheel. Face burning as if from fever.

  “Are you ill?”

  “A priest, ma’am.” Crimson-faced Paddy staring at the cracked and broken leather of his brogues. Afraid to look up at her, a convert already talked of as a saint. But her voice still all Yankee Protestant, sharp, clipped, superior.

  “You wish to see a priest, is that it, Mr. Hughes?”

  Tumble of words: desire to be a priest. Certainty of God’s call.

  The sharpness gone from her speech. Respect of the sisters for your habits of hard work. Edified by your devotion. “But, Mr. Hughes, a priest is more than just serious and sober. He must be a man of learning.” Latin. A language in which he must think as well as pray.

  Had a bit of the Latin in Ireland, Mother. Sure I could learn it. Already studying the books the sisters have passed on. Left unsaid: worn, tattered books, same as they used with the children of the slaves.

  “It is not my place to recommend candidates for the priesthood. Talk to Father Dubois. He is a man of understanding and sympathy. He will do all he can to help.”

  Thought: an arrogant Frenchman. Impossible to talk to. Said: Please, Mother, they will listen to you.

  “Very well, I will give it some thought. Perhaps there is some way I can help.”

  Wanted her to know how grateful. Face pressed to the screen like a little boy’s. But the room is empty. She is gone. Scarecrow is the only witness, arms outstretched like Christ’s on the Cross.

  Ecce terriculum.

  All gone. Mother Seton. Dubois. Years before. What was left? Only what the mirror beheld. An image to frighten birds, not men. No red hat. Half-built church. Sickness. Old age. Now this. Undone in a week what had taken a quarter of a century to build.

  The Mayor, the Governor, the newspapers: You must tell the mob the Church is against them. Command them to stop.

  As if they would listen. As if they would desist at one word from him.

  What else did they expect him to say?

  All my fault. Mea maxima culpa. Note of humility and contrition. Atonement for his arrogance, harshness, threats.

  Nineteen years before, in 1844, they expected the same. Philadelphia in flames. Two Catholic churches burned. A Catholic library destroyed. A dozen people dead, scores wounded. A na-tivist delegation on its way to New York with a bloodstained flag. Fliers everywhere: Rally to Be Held at City Hall Park! Papists and Foreigners Be Warned!

  Went to see Mayor Morris. James Harper, the Mayor-elect, also there. Twin smirks. Can’t hide their glee that the chief Paddy has come to beg their protection. Don’t even offer a chair.

  “Are you afraid that some of your churches will be burned, Reverend Hughes?” the Mayor asks. A serpent’s solicitude.

  “No, I’m afraid some of yours will be”

  They rise together out of their chairs.

  “Is that a threat?” asks Mayor-elect Harper.

  Only a fact: If you countenance a nativist demonstration in this city, the consequences belong to you, and if a single Catholic church is burned, New York will become a second Moscow.

  They turn in unison to the window as though the conflagration might already be under way. Park Row can be seen through swaying, leafy branches. Bustling, not burning.

  Mayor-elect Harper: “I have never encountered such villainy in a clergyman! It is intolerable!”

  Chief Paddy: “Sir, if I wished a lesson in villainy, I should think of no better teacher than a publisher like yourself who is so ashamed of printing the vile and lurid lies of the likes of Maria Monk that he sets up a separate publishing house to spew such anti-Catholic filth. Good day, gentlemen. You are forewarned.”

  Words burned in their brains. The prophecy of Dagger John: New York will become a second Moscow.

  Now it was.

  Rumble of artillery, pitched battles in the streets, murders and mutilations, lynchings, looting, mass drunkenness, arson, larceny. Cries of newsboys: Massacre on Second Avenue! Terrible Battle in the Fourteenth Ward! “The Arch-Hypocrite himself,” Mr. Horace Greeley proclaims, “let him tell his people to stop!”

  Just like that: Jes
us telling the waves to be still. Did Greeley and the others know the lie of it? Was that what they wanted to see? For him to say “Stop” and for it to continue? A public hu-miliation. Or did they really believe that the mobs would halt in their tracks and go to their homes at a word from Dagger John, the High Priest of Paddydom?

  Dictated a statement to Corrigan. In spite of Mr. Greeley’s assault upon the Irish, in the present disturbed condition of the city, I will appeal not only to them, but to all persons who love God and revere the holy Catholic religion which they profess, to respect the laws, etc.

  Published it. Not enough, they said. Some of his own priests come to him. Walk the streets, they pleaded. Make an appearance.

  In a few moments he would step out onto the balcony. Could hear the voices below. Needed help in order to walk. Would have to sit as he spoke.

  Not enough, they would say. Waited till Friday, when the army had the situation in hand.

  Damn them all. What did they know?

  The day Hughes had met with Morris and Harper, he’d walked out of City Hall down Park Row, barely aware of where he was headed. It was midday, and the crowds grew thicker as he approached Chatham Square and the Bowery, the saloons more numerous. A block away, the Five Points was as filled with revelers as it would be at midnight. Whores beckoned from doorways. Street musicians and beggars competed for the sidewalk. In the middle of the block, two muscular Negroes carried on a pugilistic demonstration. A semicircle of spectators egged them on, tossing pennies as the bigger of the two beat the other to his knees.

  Farther along Chatham Street, at the corner of Roosevelt, a horde of dirty, half-naked children gamboled around a trench that overflowed with garbage. Old men sat on rickety wooden steps and talked with one another in Irish. Women shouted out of windows at the children in the street. Hughes crossed to the other side. A horse lay dead, its head on the curb. Two small children squatted beside it. Little more than infants, dressed only in sacks, they clapped with delight as two older boys stuck crumpled newspapers under the horse’s tail and mane, and set them on fire. None of them saw Hughes as he crossed the street. He grabbed the biggest boy by the collar and spun him around. The threadbare collar ripped loose, and the boy fell backward on the sidewalk. The other boy ran away, and the infants began to cry.