Make Me a City

by Jonathan Carr

  Mr. Krumpacker must have sent urgently for Mr. Goodman because he arrived the next day, a hard-eyed Yankee on a white horse who spat and swore at that cussed rock, as if the rock had no business to be there. He was the same as an English landlord because that was the only time we ever saw him, if you follow my meaning. A few days later, Mr. Krumpacker (the landlord’s bailiff) came to the site with a bag of black powder.

  It probably won’t surprise you that Mr. Krumpacker did not like Mochta. He never dared to leather him and we all knew why. The ganger was no dwarf but that brother of mine was a giant, the biggest man in the camp, and probably Chicago too. So when Mochta took breaks to smoke his pipe, the German would pretend not to notice, and whenever he raised our spirits by leading a song in the Irish tongue (only English was allowed on the line), Mr. Krumpacker would ride his horse in the opposite direction until we had quietened down. In little ways like this, Mochta whittled away at the anchor line of Mr. Krumpacker’s authority. And I don’t doubt this was behind what happened next.

  Mr. Krumpacker chose Mochta to lay the charges and set them off. You might think this was a job that needed nimble fingers and caution and experience, and you would be right. Life and death was a lottery for all of us in that camp. Every week another soul was lost to fever. Whenever dysentery or typhoid struck, a cull took place. It was wretched and a tragedy. There was no comfort in suffering like that, but at least we could say we had equal chances, to live or die. But when you blast your way through rock with black powder and a fuse, there is only one man at risk, and Mr. Krumpacker knew it.

  Mochta, the great fool, rejoiced in his new role. He always liked to be at the center of things. He never recognized a risk in anything, and explosions were no different. It thrilled him to pack the powder into the cigar-sized holes we had taken turns to chisel out of the rock at one-foot intervals. That’s no easy work, neither. The chisels were blunt, my blisters burned and however hard we worked, it was never quick enough for Mr. Krumpacker. Mochta would lay the fuse and, always with a wink toward the rest of us to make sure he had our attention, he’d strike the match and light the taper and as the flame fizzled fast in one direction, Mochta would hurl himself in the other, laughing like a maniac as if he were charging along the White Strand in the final game of hurley against the Dunquin folk in Christmas week. We were at a distance, crouching with our hands over our ears, our backs turned as the powder exploded and shards of rock went flying and black smoke belched out and our breath choked on that metallic-stinking cloud, while Mochta continued to cry out in a kind of ecstasy, as though the blast had revealed to him a mystery the rest of us could not see.

  This went on for weeks. Mr. Krumpacker ordered us to collect the broken rock and chip it into slabs because the absent Mr. Goodman had decided they must be used to build locks to manage the Canal’s descent to the river. That’s right, it was the Des Plaines River. In the end, we would build four of those locks: four locks and, as I’ll explain shortly, a clochan.

  Mochta became the expert of how to break the rock to best effect. Whenever he was cut by slivers before he had time to get away, he laughed it off, as if it was nothing. You’d likely be thinking the same as me, that the number of those accidents should have gone down, the more experienced he became. They didn’t. They increased. They increased because the quality of Mr. Krumpacker’s black powder decreased. In cheap black powder, Mochta told me, the ingredients were either mixed in the wrong amounts or they weren’t pounded tight enough. The result wasn’t only weaker, it was more unpredictable. It exploded too soon and scattered too far. Was Mr. Krumpacker saving money for Mr. Goodman, or was the extra going into his own pocket? When there’s a shoal of guilt to be shared, everyone’s net is heavy.

  Although Mochta liked to play the hero, he was no fool either. He complained to Mr. Krumpacker and when the powder didn’t improve, he refused to lay any more until it did. For a while it did get better, but then, just before the end, Mr. Krumpacker began to save his pennies again. The powder was the poorest Mochta had ever seen. And that was why he lost his right eye.

  And this, my young scribe, is where the story about that great rogue of a brother really begins. I won’t tell you what pain that lost eye caused him, how it affected his balance, the private distress it caused him. He never complained, neither in public nor to me. It was his fate, he would declare, and there was nothing more to be said. If that does not tell you what kind of man he was, nothing will. “I’ll get my chance one day,” he would say to me, “whenever the Great Master decides.” And by that, I guessed, he meant a chance to take revenge on Mr. Krumpacker.

  Sad to report, since the loss of that eye and wearing the patch, Mochta became more taken by the drink than I’d ever seen him, until his dollars were all drowned and he was sinking mine in whiskey too. It was as if he were intent on courting oblivion and an early grave. Every Saturday, after work was finished and we had coins in our pockets and a whole day lay ahead of us without sight or sound of that stinking muddy ditch, “Mr. Whiskey” would arrive at the camp with a crate full of bottles. He’d been a brewer from County Cork in the Old Country, so he knew his mix well enough. Mochta had never been able to turn the back of his hand to a pot, but the state of him now became a fright to see. He tossed off the whiskey like water. He’d have drunk the stuffing out of a saddle. It went too far.

  Yerra, I swear to you it did. And that was why one late summer evening I lost my temper and said too much. Was he so thick-skinned he couldn’t see we needed money for Oscar? Hadn’t he noticed the whelp was so weakly there was no telling when he might hear the final call? And what about the canoe he had promised? What kind of no-good was he, that he could waste everything on whiskey? Was he trying to kill himself?

  It was true that Oscar had been up and down ever since we made the crossing, but it wasn’t true about the money because I’ve always been the frugal kind, and I was squirreling away what I could, buried safe in a tin near the camp. Anyway, may the Devil take me, I didn’t stop there. I ranted and raved at my brother that night as I’d never done before. Hadn’t he promised me a fortune when I came to America, and wasn’t that a dreadful lie and wasn’t he ashamed of himself for bringing us here to a life more wretched than anything we’d ever known on the Island? On and on I went until my throat was sore. I blamed him for everything, which was neither fair nor honest. The truth is that I was only sorry for myself, and that’s an ugly thing to be. I can see that now.

  Well, Mochta—and may God remember this when the Scales Up There are weighed—stopped drinking at once. He stopped that very evening, as if he’d seen an angel. And maybe he had too. Yerra, maybe he had.

  He loved Oscar, you see. And Oscar loved him back. By my cloak, how he loved him back. Sometimes I had to bite my tongue, when it seemed Oscar was loving his uncle more than he loved his own father. I told myself Mochta always had that effect on people, young and old, inside the family or out. You’re puzzled by that? How do I describe what made him different to one who never met him, except to say that when the troubles of life were rolling in your wake he had the gift to smooth them into tiny ripples, to put you on an even keel, to send those ripples back to where they’d come from. Sometimes he didn’t even need to open his mouth. In those moments, he was transformed from Mochta the Clown into something rare and fine. He’d give you all his attention and listen to every word, as though there was nothing he wanted to do more, and when you were finished with your fears and worries, he’d lean forward and, the smile quite gone from his face but with eyes full of light, he’d touch you on the shoulder with his large, rough, hard-worked palms. The touch was gentle. Yet it was strong as a laying on of hands. Yerra, I swear my brother could pass the spirit on like a priest, though it be a blasphemy to say so. And it wasn’t only me that felt it.

  Mochta was always playing with Oscar. He told him stories about growing up on the Island that made it sound like a country of magic and miracles. He taught him fighting songs like “Ye Men of Sweet
Liberties Hall” and “Dunlavin Green,” which the boy still sings today when I’ve told him off for this or that. And their favorite outing was to the prairies on a Sunday, often taking with them his friend Dermot, the cook’s son. Mochta made hurleys out of local furze, and they’d practice tossing a ball for hours at a time, the same as he and I would do on the White Strand when we were young cubs.

  I went the first few times, but I could see I wasn’t needed. Oscar had a good strike and could run too, much better than Dermot. “Fly like a bird, Oscar!” his uncle would shout, and the boy would tear around those prairies fast as a comet on the turn. And then they’d laugh when Dermot tried and tripped over himself in the attempt. No wonder it’s a baseball hero Oscar always wanted to be. Go ask him how that started, and if he tells the truth you’ll hear it was because of hurley on Sundays with Uncle Mochta. He’d come back flushed and happy, and full of secrets. Oscar never cried when he was with Mochta.

  But it was me that fed and clothed and cared for the boy, sitting wakeful by his side each of those long nights he was sick. Mochta has no child of his own, I told myself. No wonder he’s trying too hard with mine. No wonder he spoils him. The sum of the matter is that my fits of envy never lasted because Mochta’s heart was wide open. There was not a shred of jealousy to his character, and that’s why he couldn’t imagine it in others. You see what I’m saying? He had no idea how I felt, and I never told him.

  And then, a few weeks after the drinking stopped, Oscar did fall sick. Very sick indeed. It began with a fever, he stopped eating, his skin came out in rashes and he grew thin as a conger. We thought he was about to make his last farewell, and the only way to save him was to seek help fast as we could from a doctor in Chicago. Mochta knew a doctor who was also a “good friend,” he said, and he would take him there at once. Maybe I should have gone too, and things would have turned out differently. But I didn’t go. We needed all the money we could get. One of us had to keep working the ditch. So I dug up my buried tin of savings, gave Mochta every last cent, and he set off for Chicago, with Oscar strapped to his back like a babe.

  I have never known days worse than those that followed, not even on the crossing, not even when my wife was taken away that night off Inishtooshkert and I found myself alone again in the world, one tiny heart beating in the big silence. Each day drifted into the next. I woke up, I dressed, I ate, I worked and then I tried to sleep. I had no appetite. I did not notice my aches and pains, blisters and bruises. I started talking to myself. My thoughts were always with Mochta and the boy. The more I worried, the more I feared Oscar was with the angels and Mochta was drinking himself into a stupor. A dozen times, I nearly started off myself for the town, but what would I do when I got there? Who did I know? How would I find Mochta?

  And then one day—O my eternal thanks to the Great Master—they returned. Oscar was on his own two feet, still weak but getting better. The doctor, I heard, had put him in isolation, treated him with broth and special syrups and bloodlettings. At first, I was too overwhelmed with joy to ask how much this treatment cost and Mochta did not mention it. But when eventually I did, he said he had found the best doctor in Chicago and I should be pleased about that. Indeed, I was, I said. But had he brought back any change from our savings? No, he had not. It had cost all our savings? Yes, all our savings, he said. And, he added with a sheepishness that alarmed me, there was also a bill to pay. A bill? I cried out in dismay. Yes, a bill, he said, scratching his big head as though it were as puzzling to him as it was to me. Begorra, only Mochta could have charmed a doctor to treat Oscar on the promise of paying for most of it later, just as only crack-toothed grinning Mochta would have agreed to such an outlandish price. It was a bill for $200, one that would take the two of us a year’s labor to pay off, even if we pared everything else back to the bone. “Are doctors in America paid like millionaires?” I raged.

  I fumed, not because I was stingy and would have tried to save a cent where Oscar’s life depended on it, but because I knew that big oaf had been bamboozled by his “good friend” the doctor. Mochta apologized. Oh, how he apologized. But for the first time in my life I would not forgive him. For days I gave him the cold shoulder, as I had never done before. Yerra, I wanted to hurt him, and that was a terrible thing to do to your own brother, whatever his mistakes. And hurt him, indeed, I did. But how much I hurt him, how guilty I made him feel, to what tragic end I would push him, and how profoundly his passing would forever weigh down my conscience and my soul—of these things I had as yet no inkling.

  Life returned to its miserable normality. The summer passed and the fall weather began to take hold. The days were shorter, which was a blessing, but the cold began to bite. We had been forgotten, that was how it felt. No longer human beings but beasts of burden, condemned to a lifetime of hard labor. There was frost on the ground in the mornings, the earth hardened, and our meager rations of bacon strips, potatoes, coffin varnish, beans and bread did not vary. I feared what the winter would do to us. It would be our first here, and I had been warned that the cold would freeze the very blood in our veins. I was afraid for us all, but mostly for Oscar. He was big for his age (he found ways to make the cook feed him extra) and he seemed to be recovering well, but there is no telling what misfortunes lie in wait for us, hidden in the deep.

  It was in the midst of this despair, when I caught my first glimmer of Mochta’s outrageous plan. Strangely, it was I who had—without realizing—prompted it. Back in the summer, shortly after Mochta lost his eye, we were down in the ditch one day, working the picks side by side, when he remarked that though there was more turf in the land of sweat (by which he meant America) than the world would ever need, the turf here had no magic, not like in the Old Country.

  I quoted Old Conn the Poet, from a song about beating off the bailiffs. “All turf on earth is sacred,” I said, “it’s older than Adam and belongs only to God.” But Old Conn wouldn’t have sung that line about this poor turf, said Mochta. Yerra, he was right. I don’t know why it was as rough as it was. Maybe because it lacked a salty breeze to soften the clods, a mistful rain to loose its clumps, sheep and cattle to turn it dark and fertile, or maybe it was just too recently formed in the earth to burn bright and hot. I’d dreamed often enough of journeying into the prairies to search for sod to cut like the sod of Great Blasket that would keep us warm in the evenings. “By the Breviary!” I declared. “Old Conn would have seen magic even here, in this miserable turf. He’d have found a way to store it in the clochan.”

  You’re frowning. Because that’s the second time I’ve said “clochan” and you think I should tell you what it is. Be patient and bide, my friend. We have all night, and there’s a bottle here that needs draining to the last drop, though I shouldn’t be talking like that, not in view of the terrible things that have to be said. I’ll tell you what a clochan is when the time is right.

  Back to the misery of those fall days, as we headed into winter weighed down by a doctor’s bill as heavy as an anchor stone. One day, Mochta was pushing a wheelbarrow of turf up the plank when Mr. Krumpacker arrived to make one of his inspections.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Mochta quietly when he saw him coming, as if communing only with his own soul, “that it might be a good idea to be treating this turf inside a clochan.”

  Mr. Krumpacker stared at him.

  Meek as a Blasket lamb, my brother apologized for speaking aloud and pushed his barrow to tip the soil.

  On the way back, Mr. Krumpacker stopped him. He was in a good mood that day. You could tell from the way he stood rocking on his heels, hands stuffed beneath his oxters. And surely, even a man as hard as he must have felt some sense of guilt about Mochta’s eye. He asked what Mochta had been talking about.

  Oh, it was nothing, said Mochta. Only an idea, really. It was just that where we came from, turf the same as this turf he was tossing away, was worth its weight in gold. Because on the Island, just the same as on the prairies, there were hardly any trees to be
found. That’s why he knew something of the matter. “We are made experts by necessity, as Old Conn the Poet used to say,” he said, a sly touch from that big dolt. Despite his lack of respect for the Poet, at least he understood that quoting Old Conn lent weight to a man’s words. If this turf was treated the Blasket way and it worked, there would be no need to float timber downriver for fuel. “Ten slabs of this turf,” he said, “could burn for as long and hot as a whitewood tree.”

  “And how this turf you treat, Mucker?”

  “In a clochan, sir.”

  “What is this clochan?”

  Mochta pretended to reconsider. He looked at his feet. He was trying to look embarrassed. “Oh, I don’t s’pose, sir, I should be saying, now should I?”

  “Mucker?”

  Mochta looked down at us in the ditch, still pretending embarrassment. And when he spoke, he mumbled. “A clochan’s a kind of kiln, sir. You fire the turf like bricks, though it’s a book more complicated than that.”

  This exchange between them had dragged us away from our drudgery and, by the Virgin, we must have managed to keep our faces straight enough, for otherwise the joke would have ended there and then. The clochan was no mystery to us, you see.

  Yerra, I’ll put you out of your misery. Clochans are shelters that you find all over the Island. We use them for sheep, or for storing turf. Nobody could ever use a clochan as a kiln. Well, you can imagine how difficult it was for us to stop from grinning. We were all beavering our brains to imagine what might happen next. Who would girliggle first and break the spell? And when they did, what punishment would Mr. Krumpacker devise for us? For that was his way: one man’s failings became the cause of every man’s punishment. Would he go on a spree with his whip? Or would Mochta the wag step forward to plant two wet kisses on Mr. Krumpacker’s puffed-up cheeks? Stranger things had been known to happen.