McKenna nodded. McKenna smiled. McKenna holstered his weapon.
The barrel had left a mark on Luther’s forehead, an indentation he could feel. It itched. He took a step back and resisted the urge to touch the spot.
“Ah, son, you embarrassed me with the Coughlins, and embarrassment is not something a man of my ambitions can abide.” He spread his arms wide. “I just can’t.”
“Okay.”
“Ah, if only it were as easy as ‘okay.’ But it’s not. You’ll need to be taxed.” McKenna gestured at the toolbox. “You’ll put that in the vault you built, if you please.”
Luther pictured his mother watching him from above, a pain in her heart at what her only son had allowed his life to become.
“What’s in it?”
“Bad things,” McKenna said. “Bad, bad things. I want you to know that, Luther. I want you to know that what you’re doing is a terrible thing that will immeasurably hurt the people you care about. I want you to realize that you brought this on yourself and that there is, I assure you, no way out for you or your wife.”
When McKenna had the gun to his head, Luther had realized one truth beyond any: McKenna was going to kill him before this was over. Kill him and forget all about this. He’d leave Lila untouched simply because getting involved in a nigger prosecution over a thousand miles away was pointless if the source of his rage was already dead. So Luther knew this as well: no Luther, no danger to those he loved.
“I ain’t selling out my people,” he told McKenna. “Ain’t planting anything in the NAACP offices. Fuck that and fuck you.”
Clayton let loose a hiss of disbelief.
McKenna, though, looked like he’d been expecting it. “Is that right?”
“That’s right.” Luther looked down at the toolbox. He looked back up at McKenna. “I ain’t—”
McKenna put a hand behind his ear, as if to hear better, pulled the revolver from his belt, and shot Clayton Tomes in the chest.
Clayton held up a hand, palm turned outward. He looked down at the smoke curling from the hole in his overalls. The smoke gave way to a stream of thick, dark fluid, and Clayton cupped his hand under it. He turned and walked carefully over to one of the cans of plaster he and Luther had just been sitting on while they ate and smoked and jawed. He touched the can with his hand before taking a seat.
He said, “What the…?” and leaned his head back against the wall.
McKenna crossed his hands over his groin and tapped the barrel of the pistol against his thigh. “You were saying, Luther?”
Luther’s lips trembled, hot tears pouring down his face. The air smelled of cordite. The walls shook from the winter wind.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Luther whispered. “What the fuck is—”
McKenna fired again. Clayton’s eyes widened, and a small wet pop of disbelief left his mouth. The bullet hole appeared then, just below his Adam’s apple. He grimaced, as if he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him and reached his hand toward Luther. Then his eyes rolled back from the effort and he lowered the hand to his lap. He closed his eyes. He took several shallow gulps of air and then the sound of him stopped.
McKenna took another sip from his flask. “Luther? Look at me.”
Luther stared at Clayton. They’d just been talking about the finish-work that lay ahead. They’d just been eating sandwiches. Tears slid into Luther’s mouth.
“Why would you do that? He didn’t mean anyone harm. He never—”
“Because you don’t run this monkey show. I do.” McKenna tilted his head and bored his eyes into Luther’s. “You’re the monkey. Clear?”
McKenna slid the barrel of the gun into Luther’s mouth. It was still hot enough to burn his tongue. He gagged on it. McKenna pulled back the hammer. “He was no American. He was not a member of any acceptable definition of the human race. He was labor. He was a footrest. He was a beast of burden, sure, nothing more. I disposed of him to prove a point, Luther: I would sooner mourn a footrest than the death of one of yours. Do you think I’m going to stand idly by while Isaiah Giddreaux and that clothed orangutan Du Bois attempt to mongrelize my race? Are you insane, lad?” He pulled the pistol from Luther’s mouth and swung it at the walls. “This building is an affront to every value worth dying for in this country. Twenty years from now people will be stunned to hear we allowed you to live as freemen. That we paid you a wage. That we allowed you to converse with us or touch our food.” He holstered the pistol and grabbed Luther by the shoulders and squeezed. “I will happily die for my ideals. You?”
Luther said nothing. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He wanted to go to Clayton and hold his hand. Even though he was dead, Luther thought he could somehow make him feel less alone.
“If you speak to anyone about this, I will kill Yvette Giddreaux after she takes her lunch in Union Park some afternoon. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you—whatever I tell you and whenever I tell you it—I will kill one nigger every week in this city. You’ll know it’s me because I will shoot them through the left eye so they will go to their nigger god half blind. And their deaths will be on your head, Luther Laurence. Yours and yours alone. Do we have an understanding?”
He let go of Luther and stepped back.
“Do we?”
Luther nodded.
“Good Negro.” McKenna nodded. “Now Officer Hamilton and Officer Temple and myself, we’re going to stay with you until—Are you listening?”
Clayton’s body fell off the plaster can. It lay on the floor, one arm pointed at the door. Luther turned his head away.
“We’re going to stay here with you until dusk. Say you understand, Luther.”
“I understand,” Luther said.
“Isn’t that ducky?” McKenna put his arm around Luther. “Isn’t that grand?” He steered Luther around until they were both facing Clayton’s body.
“We’re going to bury him in the backyard,” McKenna said. “And we’re going to put the toolbox in the vault. And we’re going to come up with an acceptable story for you to tell Miss Amy Wagenfeld when she sends an investigator your way, which surely she will, as you will be the last person to have seen our Mr. Tomes before he absconded from our fair city, probably with an underage white girl. And once we’ve done all that, we’ll wait for the announcement of the ribbon cutting. And you will call me the moment you know that date or…?”
“You’ll…you’ll—”
“Kill a nigger,” McKenna said, pushing Luther’s head back and forth in a nod. “Is there any part of this I need to repeat for you?”
Luther looked into the man’s eyes. “No.”
“Magnificent.” He let go of Luther and removed his coat. “Boys, take off your coats, the both of you. Let’s give Luther a hand with this plaster, shall we? Man shouldn’t have to do everything by himself, sure.”
CHAPTER thirty
The house on K Street shriveled into itself. The rooms narrowed and the ceilings seemed to droop and the quiet that replaced Nora was spiteful. It remained that way through the spring and then deepened when word reached the Coughlins that Danny had taken Nora for a wife. Joe’s mother went to her room with migraines, and the few times Connor wasn’t working—and he worked around the clock lately—his breath stank of alcohol and his temper was so short that Joe gave him a wide berth whenever they found themselves in the same room. His father was even worse—Joe would look up to see the old man staring at him with a glaze in his eyes that suggested he’d been doing it for some time. The third time this happened, in the kitchen, Joe said, “What?”
His father’s eyelids snapped. “Excuse me, boy?”
“You’re staring, sir.”
“Don’t get lippy with me, son.”
Joe dropped his eyes. It may have been the longest he’d dared hold his father’s gaze in his life. “Yes, sir.”
“Ah, you’re just like him,” his father said and opened his morning paper with a loud crackling of the pages.
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nbsp; Joe didn’t bother asking who his father was referring to. Since the wedding, Danny’s name had joined Nora’s on the list of things you couldn’t speak aloud. Even at twelve, Joe was all too aware that this list, which had been in place long before he was born, held the key to most mysteries of the Coughlin bloodline. The list was never discussed because one of the items on the list was the list itself, but Joe understood that first and foremost on the list was anything that could cause embarrassment to the family—relatives who’d engaged in repeated public drunkenness (Uncle Mike), who’d married outside of the Church (Cousin Ed), who’d committed crimes (Cousin Eoin, out in California), committed suicide (Cousin Eoin again), or given birth out of wedlock (Aunt Somebody in Vancouver; she’d been so completely banished from the family that Joe didn’t know her name; she existed like a small stream of smoke that curled into the room before someone thought to shut the door). Sex, Joe understood, was stamped in bold at the top of the list. Anything to do with it. Any hint that people even thought about it, never mind had it.
Money was never discussed. Nor were the vagaries of public opinion and the new modern mores, both of which were deemed anti-Catholic and anti-Hibernian as a matter of course. There were dozens of other items on the list, but you never knew what they were until you mentioned one and then you saw from a single look that you’d wandered out into the minefield.
What Joe missed most about Danny’s absence was that Danny couldn’t have given a shit about the list. He didn’t believe in it. He’d bring up women’s suffrage at the dinner table, talk about the latest debate over the length of a woman’s skirt, ask his father what he thought of the rise of Negro lynchings in the South, wonder aloud why it took the Catholic Church eighteen hundred years to decide Mary was a virgin.
“That’s enough,” his mother had cried to that one, her eyes welling.
“Now look what you did,” his father said.
It was quite a feat—managing to hit two of the biggest, boldest items on the list, sex and the failings of the Church, at the same time.
“Sorry, Ma,” Danny said and winked at Joe.
Christ, Joe missed that wink.
Danny had shown up at Gate of Heaven two days after the wedding. Joe saw him as he exited the building with his classmates, Danny out of uniform and leaning against the wrought-iron fence. Joe kept his composure, though heat flushed from his throat to his ankles in one long wet wave. He walked through the gate with his friends and turned as casually as he could toward his brother.
“Buy you a frankfurter, brother?”
Danny had never called him “brother” before. It had always been “little brother.” It changed everything, made Joe feel a foot taller, and yet part of him immediately wished they could go back to how it had been.
“Sure.”
They walked up West Broadway to Sol’s Dining Car at the corner of C Street. Sol had just recently added the frankfurter to his menu. He’d refused to do so during the war because the meat sounded too German and he had, like most restaurants during the war, taken great pains to change the name of frankfurters to “Liberty Sausages” on his menu board. But now the Germans were beaten, and there were no hard feelings about it in South Boston, and most of the diners in the city were trying hard to catch up with this new fad that Joe & Nemo’s had helped popularize in the city, even if, at the time, it had called their patriotism into question.
Danny bought two for each of them and they sat atop the stone picnic bench out in front of the diner and ate them with bottles of root beer as cars navigated horses and horses navigated cars out on West Broadway and the air smelled of the coming summer.
“You heard,” Danny said.
Joe nodded. “You married Nora.”
“Sure did.” He bit into his frankfurter and raised his eyebrows and laughed suddenly before he chewed. “Wish you could have been there.”
“Yeah?”
“We both did.”
“Yeah.”
“But the folks would never have allowed it.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
Joe shrugged. “They’ll get over it.”
Danny shook his head. “No they won’t, brother. No they won’t.”
Joe felt like crying, but he smiled instead and swallowed some meat and took a sip of root beer. “They will. You’ll see.”
Danny placed his hand softly to the side of Joe’s face. Joe didn’t know what to do, because this had never happened. You slugged each other on the shoulder. You jabbed each other in the ribs. You didn’t do this. Danny looked down at him with soft eyes.
“You’re on your own in that house for a while, brother.”
“Can I come visit?” Joe heard his own voice crack, and he looked down at his frankfurter and was pleased to see no tears fell on it. “You and Nora?”
“Of course. But that’ll put you in the doghouse with the folks if you get caught.”
“Been in the doghouse before,” Joe said. “Plenty. Might start barking soon.”
Danny laughed at that, a bark unto itself. “You’re a great kid, Joe.”
Joe nodded and felt the heat in his face. “How come you’re leaving me, then?”
Danny tipped his chin up with his finger. “I’m not leaving you. What’d I say? You can come by anytime.”
“Sure.”
“Joe, Joe, I’m fucking serious. You’re my brother. I didn’t leave the family. The family left me. Because of Nora.”
“Dad and Con’ said you’re a Bolshevik.”
“What? To you?”
Joe shook his head. “I heard them talking one night.” He smiled. “I hear everything in there. It’s an old house. They said you went native. They said you were a wop-lover and a nigger-lover and you lost your way. They were really drunk.”
“How could you tell?”
“They started singing near the end.”
“No shit? ‘Danny Boy’?”
Joe nodded. “And ‘Kilgary Mountain’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’”
“You don’t hear that one a lot.”
“Only when Dad’s really snockered.”
Danny laughed and put his arm around him and Joe rocked against it.
“You go native, Dan?”
Danny kissed his forehead. Actually kissed it. Joe wondered if he was drunk.
Danny said, “Yeah, I guess so, brother.”
“You love Italians?”
Danny shrugged. “I got nothing against ’em. You?”
“I like them. I like the North End. Just like you do.”
Danny bounced a fist lightly off his knee. “Well, good then.”
“Con’ hates ’em, though.”
“Yeah, well, Con’s got a lot of hate in him.”
Joe ate the rest of his second frankfurter. “Why?”
Danny shrugged. “Maybe because when he sees something that confuses him, he feels like he needs an answer right then. And if the answer ain’t right in front of him, he grabs onto whatever is and makes it the answer.” He shrugged again. “I honestly don’t know, though. Con’s had something eating him up since the day he was born.”
They sat in silence for a bit, Joe swinging his legs off the edge of the stone table. A street vendor coming home from a day at Haymarket Square pulled over to the curb. He climbed off his cart, breathing wearily through his nostrils, and went to the front of his horse and lifted its left leg. The horse snuffled softly and twitched at the flies on its tail and the man shushed it as he pulled a pebble from its hoof and tossed it out onto West Broadway. He lowered the leg and caressed the horse’s ear and whispered into it. The horse snuffled some more as the man climbed back up onto his cart, its eyes dark and sleepy. The vendor whistled softly and the horse clopped back into the street. When it dropped a clump of shit from between its flanks and cocked its head proudly at the creation, Joe felt a smile spread across his face he couldn’t explain.
Danny, watching, too, said, “Damn. Size of a hat.”
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sp; Joe said, “Size of a breadbasket.”
“I believe you’re right,” Danny said, and they both laughed.
They sat as the light turned rusty behind the tenements along the Fort Point Channel and the air smelled of the tide and the clogging stench of the American Sugar Refining Company and the gases of the Boston Beer Company. Men crossed back over the Broadway Bridge in clusters and other groups wandered up from the Gillette Company and Boston Ice and the Cotton Waste Factory and most entered the saloons. Soon the boys who ran numbers for the neighborhood were dashing in and out of those same saloons, and from across the channel another whistle blew to signal the end of another working day. Joe wished he could stay here forever, even in his school clothes, with his brother, on a stone bench along West Broadway as the day faded around them.
Danny said, “You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you’re born to and the one you build.”
“Two families,” Joe said, eyeing him.
He nodded. “Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there’s another family and that’s the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they’re as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don’t have to look out for you and they don’t have to love you. They choose to.”
“So you and Luther, you chose each other?”
Danny cocked his head. “I was thinking more of me and Nora, but now that you mention it, I guess me and Luther did, too.”
“Two families,” Joe said.
“If you’re lucky.”
Joe thought about that for a bit and the inside of his body felt splashy and ungrounded, as if he might float away.
“Which are we?” Joe said.
“The best kind.” Danny smiled. “We’re both, Joe.”
At home, it got worse. Connor, when he talked, ranted about the anarchists, the Bolsheviks, the Galleanists, and the mud races who constituted their core. Jews financed them, he said, and Slavs and wops did their dirty work. They were riling up the niggers down South and poisoning the minds of the working whites back east. They’d tried to kill his boss, the attorney general of the United States of America, twice. They talked of unionization and rights for the workingman, but what they really wanted was violence on a national scale and despotism. Once turned onto the subject, he couldn’t be turned off, and he’d just about combust when talk turned to the possibility of a police strike.
The Given Day Page 49