Murderers, Scoundrels and Ragamuffins

by Richard Sullivan

  He took from his pocket a small waxed paper packet of shredded wheat crackers and bent down. The dog was too weak to take the offering. Jim broke off a small piece and pressed it to the dog’s lips. “Come on boy. Take some. Come on.” Slowly the dog drew the fragment in and painfully chewed. Then he took another, then another, until they were all gone. Jim filled a bowl with water from the dirty sink piled deep with dishes and pans. The dog drank for over a full minute straight.

  Jim looked at the dead woman. He looked then at the dog. He couldn’t just leave him there. The dog too was on his last legs. He’d surely die, alone, like his mistress. Jim couldn’t go back and change what he’d already done. But he could change this. He took a towel, picked up the filthy dog, wrapped him in it and left.

  After his unsettling shift, Jim returned home, unsure how he might broach the subject of Butler’s terrible accusations with his mother. He decided to be forthright.

  Mary was out back, removing laundry from the line. Behind the houses on Hamburg Street an Erie RR train slowly chugged by not bothering to sound its whistle as it crossed busy South Street where hordes of children, dangerously distracted, played. The engine gushed filthy coal soot into the air, for all intents and purposes rendering Mary’s full day of exhausting washboard scrubbing moot.

  “Hiya, Ma.”

  She looked up and smiled, until she saw the dog.

  “Dear God, what on earth is that? He’s filthy! Pee-yew! He smells a fright!”

  “I’ll be givin’ the old fella a bath out here in the yard, Ma. Don’t worry. He can sleep on the porch. It’s just for the night anyways, just until his owner gets released tomorrow. Say, Ma...?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “When did Peter fight in the War Between The States?”

  She sighed.

  “Oh, ye’ll have to talk to him about it yourself, Jim. Truth and lies, they’re all the same to him. I’m not even sure he knows the difference himself these days. It’s the drink, you know.”

  “I paid a visit today to Mr. Butler at the Buffalo News.”

  “What?” she blurted. “How could ye?”

  Jim was confused.

  “Ma, I read that awful newspaper article. It’s full of lies and slander!”

  “Stay out of it, Jim!”

  “But Ma! It was written by that soused up nincompoop Cooper who plays dice with Peter! Peter put him up to it!” We got to go see an attorney.”

  “We will do no such thing! That will just keep the rumors alive! I want this to just go away, Jim! Let sleepin’ dogs lie! I already got enough to worry about with that no good husband o’ mine and his shenanigans as it is! I can’t stand no more! I just can’t!”

  “But Ma. You said yourself that the reason why we got so many arseholes runnin’ around in this world is because people let them get away with it. We need to stop Peter, stop the rumors, and teach that Butler fella his lesson. He can’t just go round printin’ lies and gettin’ away with it.”

  “Jim…listen son, ye know I’m not feelin’ at all well,” she said with heightened emotion. “And I been feelin’ poorly fer months now. My cross these days...it’s a heavy one.”

  Jim reexamined his mother’s yellowed face with fresh eyes. She pierced straight through him with a pointed gaze he’d never felt before.

  “Leave well enough alone. I don’t ask much of ye these days Jimmy. But I am askin’ fer this.”

  “Please, Ma. Let me...”

  “I said no!” she blurted temperamentally.

  She angrily stalked into the house leaving the basket sitting in the scrubby grass half full. Jim’s heart hurt. Her message was clear. He’d not respectfully heard her previously despite all the signs. But he did now.

  He finished removing the dry laundry from the line and set the basket on the stoop. Then he put the dog in his mother’s wash tub, checking first to see that no clothing remained under the Fels Naptha bubbles. The dog did not protest. Jim gently rubbed, checking the dog’s expression for signs of pain. His fur was matted and his eyes cloudy. After ten minutes Jim’s back hurt but the dog was presentably clean. He lifted him out and carried him over to the garden hose and turned it on. He rinsed off the last of the soap. The dog stood there trembling, dripping, too weak to shake off the water. Jim took a towel from the hook by the door and dried the dog, monitoring his eyes, wondering if the little fellow was going to make it. If not, at least he wouldn’t die alone like that poor woman who’d owned him.

  He wrapped the dog in the towel, stationed him by the door, and went inside. There he rescued an old cushion from the shelf in the back broom closet that held mostly discards. Then he opened the icebox and found a frankfurter. He brought the cushion outside and set the dog on it. The animal settled down and gazed though the haze of his old corneas with gratitude for the man who rescued him. Jim broke off pieces of the frank and fed them to the weak animal by hand one-by-one. The little canine seemed a bit perkier now. He managed to eke out a quiet bark. Perhaps he would make it after all.

  Finishing up, Jim washed his hands and went inside to apologize and comfort his fading mother.

  ◆◆◆

  The clipping was replaced between the pages of the book where Jim had rediscovered it. He was surprised by the rage he still felt toward Butler and by how helpless he felt for his mother’s humiliation. She was different after that incident—quieter, more withdrawn, hesitant to leave the house. If the slanderous public humiliation didn’t accelerate the progress of her illness then it surely contributed to its diminishing effects. He was still angry. He got busy and began making piles, things to throw away, things to keep. He knocked his head into the hot low-hanging bulb a few times, annoyed. The chiffonier was too heavy to bother moving. He never should have strained himself to begin with, getting that foolish thing all the way up here.

  The muffled thud of the front door’s closing sounded from two floors below. Hannah was back.

  He turned off the light, descended the narrow stairs and headed for the kitchen to make her some tea.

  Shame On You

  ◆◆◆

  From the Buffalo Express:

  The superintendent sent to the board yesterday a report adjusting teachers’ salaries, which, it is said, is according to the ordinance. One of those increases is from $700 to $1,000. It is for Miss May Martin, who for six years has had charge of the sewing in the public schools. That started the trouble.

  Some of the aldermen didn’t see why girls who had only themselves to support should receive such big salaries. Even $500 and $600 was too much, they thought. Common laboring-men, they pointed out, could not make that much money, and they paid taxes and had families to support. Alderman Martin inflamed the argument.

  After speaking against increases in general, he said:

  “Giving a raise in this case is just like putting a tail on a dress to clean the streets of Buffalo. Then the tail will float into a carriage and go around drinking tea and eating Boston pretzels.”

  Then the alderman declared that if these women were not satisfied the city would get women who were satisfied. He said that there were plenty of women willing to take their places any time they wanted to quit. It was then that the alderman further justified their argument utilizing as an example that there are men working in the street who do not get as much pay as school teachers. Continuing, the alderman from the 21st Ward declared that school teachers were getting more money than the average man.

  “And they don’t work more than five or six hours a day and if they do you certainly hear about it!”

  Alderman Sullivan could not sit idly by and hear the teachers assailed in that manner. He grabbed the first opportunity to get the floor, and declared he was surprised to hear the gentleman on the other (Republican) side of the house objecting to the increase of a school teacher’s salary.

  “You all know we have a school department that is second to none in the United States,” said Sullivan, “and I don’t know of any man that has taken gr
eater care to make the schools what they are than has Superintendent Emerson.”

  The alderman said further that he could not see why any alderman dared get up and make a protest at that time, when he failed to do so when the estimates of the department of education were passed.

  “All these things were accounted for then and the members, if they had been paying proper attention at the time, would have known it. It’s a pretty late hour to come in here making a protest when this whole thing was all gone over two months ago.

  “I’d like to remind my colleagues that we too make a greater salary than the laboring men. If that is to be your argument, that those who train to become teachers should earn less than men who have chosen not to pursue training, who choose a lesser-paid vocation, so too then should Alderman Martin be willing to forego his excess salary. His argument in this regard is sheer hypocrisy. It is an insult to the entire teaching profession.

  “I think that these small increases in salary are but justice to the people who get them. It is they that make our schools what they are. I don’t think it would be right to question any of these increases. They should be made and they will be made. Shame on you.”

  Ruth M'Gowan

  ◆◆◆

  Ruth McGowan, come to find out, was a dangerous amalgam of Svengali and sage. Brought into their pedro club by her new friend Mary Sweeney, Hannah was immediately drawn to the woman just about as strongly as the other club members were repelled. After their first card game get-together, the others voted her out. She had upset them with her radical ideas and her strange orange hair.

  “The purpose of our club is to enjoy each other’s company,” declared Kate Mahoney, “not to become riled and upset!” Almost as quickly as she had been welcomed Ruth was excluded from the club, but not from Hannah’s circle of friends. Ruth took her expulsion in stride. “I’m used to it,” she laughed. Hannah’s new acquaintance seemed to have answers to some of her most vexing questions while at the same time wreaking havoc upon her vulnerable psyche.

  By the looks of it Ruth and Hannah were the same age, more or less. Ruth was already twice a widow, first that of a prosperous sea captain lost to the cold bottomless depths of Lake Superior, then of a shady profiteering Louisiana Street saloon man who’d put himself on the wrong side of a deadly provocation. She lived more comfortably than most in the First Ward, yet she dwelled alone in her lovely little cottage on South Street. That was her preference. She was childless. That too was her preference, she claimed, but that didn’t prevent her from expressing her ideas on proper parenting. She enthusiastically sought the company of others, most of whom were predictably soon driven away by her ultraist notions. And that hair. She had a head thick with it, orange and unruly. She described the color as “bright copper,” but the tint was decidedly strange, unnatural and unlike anything the women had ever seen before. It was also so kinky as to be completely unruly. Her attempts at taming its wildness were largely unsuccessful. She had a bounteous collection of millinery under which to restrain its ferocious nature on especially difficult days. She declared humidity her worst and most formidable enemy.

  Among Ruth’s more fervent claims was her declaring that something proven true of everyone was nonetheless denied by most: that their present state of melancholy and upset was directly related to unexamined damages inflicted upon them as children. Hannah too rejected the idea of associating her own current bleak moods with things that may have happened so long ago.

  “Oh Hannah, come on now! It’s just common sense,” Ruth lectured with an unabashed air of self-assurance. “Why do you think nobody on this earth has any memories of anything before the age of three years? That is no accident. We are designed by nature in that way—in order to endure and survive those appalling things that adults do to little children unable to express themselves. This infant amnesia is universal! It is a trait inherent in all of us. Its purpose is like that of a survival mechanism. A baby has no voice, no champion, no protector. A baby cannot defend herself! She must weather the insanity and disappointments and temper tantrums of adults in order to merely survive her first tender years! If we had clear memories of those things which deranged parents, older siblings, servants and others have done to us while we lay so helpless, so defenseless, so needing in our cradle, we could never develop into grown adults of sound mind.”

  Hannah’s face reddened at the thought of what she herself may have once or twice inflicted upon her babies while being driven half insane by her unfathomable losses and the staggering responsibilities of motherhood. She felt personally accused, although she was not quite sure if this was Ruth’s intent.

  “The problem, Hannah—and it is not unique to just you and me, but exists in epidemic proportions in our society—is that people deny anything that demands they reexamine what they have come to accept as Comforting Truth. It is a double edged sword of opposing things. You see, when we cannot accept difficult challenging realities, we simply pretend they don’t exist, even when those realities are sitting right there in our laps looking us straight in the eye. Opposingly, at the same time we desperately seek comfort in beliefs that are unprovable or improbable, whether they be magic or superstition or astrology or religion. People believe preposterous things in the name of religion, Hannah! I have reached the conclusion that God is either a hateful monster or he doesn’t exist at all. That is the only logical explanation for the general horror that permeates this world we live in.”

  Ruth took advantage of the interim created by the long deafening blast of a pair of passing tugboat horns to imbibe in a couple of careful sips of hot tea.

  “You told me the other day that you credit Jesus for saving you from spiraling into insanity after the loss of your four children. Why then didn’t your Jesus just spare those dear children to begin with? Why did he allow them, and you, to suffer so? Doesn’t your Jesus have the power to prevent tragedies such as this? If so, then why didn’t he? If not, then why are you worshiping a powerless deity?”

  Hannah felt the knot in her stomach tighten. Privately she had long tortured herself with similar questions. Unlike her friends who had been provided by their priests with an assortment of rejoinders to memorize for when their beliefs were challenged by others’ application of common logic, Hannah did not bother with such things. Upon analysis she concluded how little sense some of these tenets of faith made. She was not one of those desperate to hang on to each and every belief at all costs. Her faith was fluid, open to questioning, and ever-changing. Try as she might to remain a so-called “good Catholic,”ultimately her brain rejected the more outrageous religious prattle. Tellingly, these were often the very teachings the Church defended most aggressively.

  “I agree that people tend to be sheep,” Hannah had stated more than once, “but drive them without regard for their intelligence and well being and they will seek out another shepherd.”

  “Yes, Hannah,” Ruth continued, “we adopt the beliefs of others with little questioning or examination, beliefs that did not originate with us, beliefs that upon consideration don’t hold water. Yet for whatever reason we cling to them for dear life nevertheless like a feeble kite string cast out to a drowning person. Those more incognizant persons are apt to say—and even boast—that they do or do not do certain things because ‘that is what I was taught’ or ‘that is the way I was brought up,’ as if they are proud of the fact they have yet to draw one single conclusion that is entirely their own. Well, in truth much of what we were taught by our elders is nothing less than a ditto from their own parents, and their ancestors before them, back through the ages. It is brain-washing pure and simple. It is the wholesale imposition of one generation’s beliefs upon the next while they are still too young and unformed to resist or form their own.”

  Hannah’s head was aching. She felt unsteadied by such ideas, as if Ruth had led her to stand at Niagara’s precipice in order the test her balance. Ruth was right in one regard—none of Hannah’s religious beliefs were the result of her o
wn personal investigations or reasoned scrutiny. Rather they were simply the preachings of others, preachings she had been compelled to adopt while still young and lacking, without the wherewithal to think or question.

  “It’s not my intention to cause you upset, dear Hannah, but to open your eyes to your own suffering, to have you realize how much of it is of your own doing. You have accepted other people’s beliefs incontestably as if to agree with them that you are not intelligent enough to form your own beliefs utilizing your own lovely brain. Why is it, do you think, that your Church teaches people they’ve been provided a magnificent God-given brain by their Creator yet your people must never use that God-given brain to form their own personal ideas about that Creator, or the Church, or the Bible?

  “Who were these ancient people from barbarian lands anyway, whose primitive exhortations about God we are demanded to adopt unquestioningly in these very modern times? People quote the Bible as if it were the be all and end all of life on earth Hannah, yet the Bible is an ancient book of exhortations and oppressive laws formulated by a foreign people who have not progressed one iota in the past four thousand years! It has been translated and mistranslated over and again ad infinitum! I have traveled to Jerusalem, Hannah! I have cooled my feet in the Sea of Galilee! Our world today moves into the 20th Century whilst those lesser descendants of the Bible-writers still dwell in caves and tents like the savages they are. They look and dress and think and conduct themselves exactly as their ancestors did two, three thousand years ago. They hold on to ancient vendettas and grudges against neighboring families that go back eons through time.

  “People from that part of the world provide today’s civilization neither with surgeons nor scientists nor inventors nor academicians, yet we so-called civilized people look to these primitive creatures to provide the religious laws and beliefs that will rule our one and only natural life on this earth? That, my dear, is sheer insanity.”