“I told Burke Tomas Foley would be like ten men,” he said.
Tomas lay with his great arms crossed behind his head. The small night noises of the street sounded.
O’Loughlin leaned over. His voice was a whispered laugh.
“You can bate the heads off ’em and the police won’t even come near. They’re afraid. They’re off in the next street and they don’t come over. One night Burke’s going to go over after them. Bate ’em, too.”
Three nights later Tomas went with O’Loughlin. He met Burke, who was a big, thick-bodied man with a top lip that sneered permanently upward as though balancing there some droplet of righteousness. He nodded at Tomas. His eyes were hooded. He had large pink hands that were like the skinned flesh of fatted fowl. He said something to one next to him and Tomas recognized the voice of Mayo. Then they were a crowd moving forward. There were cries and shouts and the men beat their sticks and bats into their hands and flowed down the street as one, though flagless and without even the knowledge of the face of their enemy. They erupted into a charge. Some shouted, “Up Ireland!” and others cried out the place names of their origins, towns and villages and townlands that they would never see again. These, though cries of war, revealed a sorry truth, for they betrayed the deep-down angers of men landless and adrift in the anonymous vastness of that continent. They were cries of belonging, and as the gangs crashed there on the streets they might have been engaged in some terrible act of reinvention whereby the blood spilled could make good the loss of home.
Or it might have been nothing but the running amok of hot, bloody-minded thugs. Tomas watched it happen. The ones they charged against were Italians. He did not know what feud they were engaged in or on which side lay right. He stood back, and though O’Loughlin urged at his elbow and pointed out fellows he should charge and throw into the river, he did not move. Burke was at the rear of the scene. He studied Tomas with a tight-lipped expression and turned away when O’Loughlin failed to get him engaged.
“You could kill a dozen of ’em,” O’Loughlin said. “You could take any of ’em you wanted.” His eyes were crazed and shallow, and Tomas turned from him and walked away up the street with men shouting and beating at each other at his back.
He did not go out again on the night streets for all the rest of that month. He worked overtime for free. He volunteered to stand await for ships in the night. He tried to exhaust his body and then shut down his mind with the whiskey O’Loughlin got for him. Still, sometimes the image of open fields came before him and he felt the closure of his life and its constraints and he wanted to strike out against these. He ran the crates then up and down the gangways, he worked the great mitts of his hands and the deep muscles of his shoulders until the sweat ran glistening off him and his eyes attained the faraway look of one beaten and whipped a long time.
Then one summer evening when he was still at the docks Burke came to see him. Two others who stood back attended him. Burke gestured Tomas to him with a fat pink finger. He told Tomas that famine had struck again in their country. He made a sneer of his lip and told him they were dying again in the fields and roadways and that this would only worsen as the harvesttime drew on. He said they could all be dead soon. He asked Tomas what he was going to do to help, and did not wait for an answer. He said he was sure Tomas would do what every good man of their country would do.
Tomas said nothing. He looked out at the Hudson River sleek and black and he thought of it flowing all the way across the world and into the mouth of the Shannon.
Burke put a hand on his shoulder.
“You have family there. We all have family there,” he said. “We have to help them. We need a rebellion, and for that we need funds.”
By the time Burke left there, Tomas Foley’s wages were to be halved. The money was to be his contribution towards helping overthrow the enemies of his country. He could think of it as money for Teige. It was what had to be done.
That summer the city boiled. Waves of heat floated and bent the streets and burnt off the shoulders and arms and faces of those unused to it. There was no air. Some, freckle-faced men of pale skin, fell at their work in spells and faints or drank the river water and felt their brains swell and make bulge the baked shells of their skulls. It was hotter than they had ever known. It seemed they breathed in the oven breath of a giant beast that towered over the city. Workers who had come from other countries were less afflicted and could be seen then in a kind of swaggering ease, their tanned bodies slick with oil and their smiles white.
Through it, Tomas Foley laboured on. He became nothing, another of the myriad emigrant workers in that city who lived without hope a thing too empty to call a life. He worked, he drank, he gave over his money to O’Loughlin and Burke.
He burned in summer, he froze in winter. It was only during the short springs or in early autumn that he felt any ease, and in these he was tormented with memories of the country left behind.
And years slipped by.
He learned that the famine struck again. And then again. He saw the ships of the wretched come and knew well the wan and hollowed look of those families who had survived starvation and sickness and the sea. They seemed to him to look in more desperation than those of the year before and were like casualties in some long, horrific war. He could not bear to look in their faces. They were grey figures, sunkencheeked, with ruined teeth and bloodied gums prominent, collarbones poking outward, flesh dried and dead and flaking. There were forlorn grandmothers and mothers and children thin as sticks. A hard wind might have snapped them. One day he saw four boys of eight and ten in dirtied shirts and the expressions of old men, with coughs making water their eyes. Their father had been buried on the sea. Tomas’s throat rose at the sight of them. He held his teeth tightly together to stop his jaw from shaking. He looked about at the sorry assembly arrived there and thought: These must be the last left living in my country. And now they are here. He did not go and ask them. He did not go forward and tell that he had been one of them, too. Instead he kept his head down and worked on that day and banged the crates and spat angrily into the river whenever the vision of suffering assailed him. That night he came back to the boardinghouse soured and bitter and told O’Loughlin to get him two bottles of whiskey. When the little man returned Tomas told him he would give no more money to Burke. He told him it was useless, what had they done? O’Loughlin tried to say great progress had been made, plans were afoot, but Tomas turned and grabbed him by the throat and held and shook him like that and then threw him back on the bed with a curse. The small man said nothing more then.
In deep sleep that night Tomas dreamed his country was a woman who ran a knife across the surface of her womb. Her blood ran out like a stream and he watched it, that awful emptying that flowed over the ground. And it took the form of ghostlike faces. Tomas saw his father and his brother among them. He woke. There was a cold sweat over him.
My father and Teige are dead, he thought.
He blinked his eyes at the darkness of the long room. He lay there like that a time to steady himself. Then he leaned over and reached in the canvas bag of his things that he kept beneath the bed and he took out the tattered rolled rag of his brother’s shirt. He held it in his hands and sat so, and it was some time before he noticed that Patrick O’Loughlin was gone, along with both of his boots and any money he had in the world.
13
He could not stay there after that. When he gathered his senses, Tomas Foley walked out of that place barefoot into the streets and never returned to the dockside warehouse of Joshua MacMaster, Shipping Merchant. He just walked away. He walked westward and was like one trying to increase with each footstep the distance between himself and his country.
He is lost then from any history. And so he wandered, and in such wandering vanished into the crowds of those nameless and without domain until one winter’s night some years later in a small town not far from the city of Cincinnati.
It was snowing. The flakes whirled out
of the dark. Tom Foley, for so he was now, walked out of a bar and a man came after him and hit him across the back with a swung rifle. He fell face forward into the slush of the street. The man said nothing. He raised the rifle by its barrel a second time. He wore a coat of furs and a hat of beaver skin. His face was blotched from raw whiskey and he blinked his eyes as he swung again. The rifle arced through the snow air and on the ground Tom Foley rolled to avoid it. He kicked out with his right leg and the fur man toppled and soon both were tumbling over in the mud of the street. Men came and stood to watch in the yellow lamplight. The fur man was large and grunted and tried to make fist blows from the side. But Tom paid them no heed. He rolled the man easily and then struck him hard in the midriff. Then he stood up.
He stepped two paces away in his Russian greatcoat and brushed at it with his hands. And in so doing, he did not hear the man cock the rifle at his back. There was a moment upon which his life balanced. The snow, the mud, the yellow light, the smoke that hung there, the horses, and the smells of sweat and dirt and whiskey, all were part of it. Somewhere in him he sensed his own death. It was as if Death Himself suddenly appeared there as a grey phantasm in the street, and in that same instant Tom Foley knew that He was come for him. He might have seen the strides He took toward him and how these were then so swift and effortless that Death was almost upon him before he could take a last breath. For then the riflefired. He saw his own blood spurt out through him and briefly rouge the snowy air. It shot out in fierce and sudden leakage and his brain fuddled with incomprehension as to whence it came. He looked down. The coat was holed clean through below his ribs. He fingered it and like a child then pressed the finger farther until it was inside the hole in himself. The bleeding ceased and he fell on his knees. He was there in the street, unhanded by any and studied by a few as the snow fell upon him. The fur man staggered to his feet. He swayed with the rifle that smoked thinly still. Some element of conscience fought within him, for he turned to those watching and showed an expression of strange pride and bafflement both that he had shot a man in the back.
Tom felt Death lay hands upon him. The snow touched his face, but he could not feel it. He wanted to close his eyes. His hand upon his side was soaked in blood and it squelched when he lifted and replaced it. He was cold. He knelt there and did not fall over and was like one faulty in performance of dying. The fur man behind him held the rifle another minute. None stepped out from the sidewalk. They shuffled there and murmured and held their glasses and waited. The rifle passed along the line of them as the fur man turned and gazed upon them as on a jury. Then he threw the rifle on the ground and hurried away through the falling snow.
A man walked forward then and touched Tom Foley on the side of his neck and then called to others, and these came and carried the wounded man from the street.
Three days later Tom Foley learned that the bullet had passed through him. The doctor that attended him was Philip James Brown. He was a strongly built man of about sixty years with a round head and thin, reddish hair. His eyes were kind and his manner assured. He had had Tom brought to a room at the side of his own house where men of various kind had lain to recover. There he had dressed and wrapped the wound and doctored it in the method used. He had said little at first, the gravity of the situation denying it; then, as Tom Foley sat propped on the bed, Philip Brown asked him where he was from. To the response he did not say anything at first. He nodded his head and offered Tom a drink. He watched him while he took it. He asked him what his plans were.
“I have given up making plans.”
“That a fact?”
“I plan to live until I die.”
“Glad to hear it. Hate to hear a man wanted to die after I stopped him bleeding all over my floor.”
“I’m grateful for what you did. I will repay you.”
“I didn’t do it for the money.”
“Why did you?” Tom Foley asked him.
“I’m a doctor,” Brown said, and he sat there in a chair by the bed and held his drink and the two of them dwelled in the amber hush of twilight and said no more as the noises in the street came and went.
Less than a week later Tom was able to walk. The first thing he did was go outside of the house and around to the back, where he managed one-handed to swing an ax and split the many logs that were assembled there. When the doctor returned he looked at the timber and thought to admonish the patient but simply thanked him instead.
“I will be gone tomorrow,” Tom said.
“Gone where?” Brown said.
“On.”
“I see. Plans?”
“No.”
The doctor said no more then. He waited until the evening had drawn in and the street darkened and he and Tom Foley sat one last time on the porch seats where the doctor liked to smoke in the chill winter air.
“How you going to repay me?” Brown said. He was looking away over the small fence that separated them from the street.
“You didn’t want me to.”
“Not money, I said.” The doctor kept his eyes far away. He seemed to be engaged in some study of the air in the middle distance.
Tom Foley looked at him. “What?”
“Well, let’s see here,” Brown said. “I saved your life, that’s for sure, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, there has to be some payment, otherwise every fool in the street’ll be shooting down some other fella, saying Doc Brown will patch him up no charge. You see my point? Where would that leave me? No, there has to be something,” he said, and drew on his cigarette and waited. A moon was rising through clouds and suddenly the snowed street turned a dirty yellow.
“What?” Tom Foley asked him again.
“I have a lifelong interest in this country,” the doctor said then. “Had it since I was a small boy and my mama told me she had come here on a ship from Scotland and that this country had been her saviour. That’s what she called it. Her saviour. And I often got to thinking about that. How can a country be your saviour? And I didn’t know then about all she had suffered and her sea voyage and all that. I didn’t know her father had been hunted down and hanged and that she had seen him swinging from a tree. She told me that only when she was lying in a bed dying and raving with fever.”
The doctor paused and pushed his lower lip out and back a little, then he took his right hand and rubbed at his chin stubble and waited a time.
“So, she had a good life after that beginning. That’s what struck me. That’s what it is about this country. You can begin here. It can be your saviour. Long as you don’t get shot down in the street,” he added, and made a small smile in the corners of his lips.
“There’s a man going to make this country better,” Brown said. His voice was soft but firm. “He’s going to find a way to bring the railroad all the way to California.” He paused again and let the smoke drift on the cold and seem a measure of the vastness of that distance in geography.
“I want you to go with him, Tom,” he said at last.
The night was still. The chairs creaked on the old porch.
“I want you to keep an eye on him. He’s been shot two times already.” The doctor rocked in his chair and the clouds came and passed across the face of the moon.
“Who is he?” Tom Foley asked then.
The doctor did not turn to him, his features obscured in the poverty of clouded moonlight.
“He’s my son,” he said.
14
Tom Foley left the doctor’s house two days later and rode westward on a chestnut gelding that once belonged to a man that had been gut shot in the street and cut and patched and sewn by Brown. That man was General Isaac Stephens, under whose command a unit of the Corps of Topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army was engaged in surveying the land west of the Mississippi River for a rail route that would join the two sides of the continent. In that unit was one Lieutenant Philip J. Brown, engineer, draughtsman, and map reader.
“When Stephens sees his horse
, he’ll know I sent you,” the doctor had said. “He owes me. You’ll ride with them, you’ll see. Give him this.” He handed over a letter. “Say nothing to Phil, mind. But send me a letter sometimes. You know, to say how he is.”
Tom Foley had sat the horse and nodded at the old man then. He did not say he had never written a letter in his life. The doctor blinked his eyes and then raised a hand in sudden salute and went off inside.
15
General Stephens was at that time at a fort near Quincy on the Mississippi River. It was farther than Tom Foley had ever travelled over land. He had been shown where it was on the doctor’s map but only knew it as a point directly westward. Still, he would find it. It was not yet spring and the wind blew cold and bitter as he rode. He wore the collars of his greatcoat up and his hat low. The land spread out before him. He galloped the horse through terrain green and rolling and fringed with mountains. He travelled on. He did not stop, for he feared the unit of the army would be gone and the lieutenant with them. He came out into bright, hard days and followed for a time the stagecoach road to St. Louis. Then he left this and cut northward as was his understanding of the map. He crossed a hundred small rivers and sometimes stopped and watered the horse and crouched down to taste the current before continuing on. He rode with a sense of mission. He heard the hooves of his horse beat over the ground and took from that some kind of ease and satisfaction. He was happiest in motion. Sometimes he saw a coach or wagon or a lone rider or more, but all he left likewise alone and did not seek any company. The vastness of the land was like mesmerism upon him. It made his spirit tranquil, for the more he journeyed on in the same relentless way, day after day, the more the griefs of his past became numbed and then slipped away. He was a figure in the landscape, nothing more. He was a momentary speck on the huge open space he crossed, and he took from this some portion of peace.
The Fall of Light Page 24