Paradise Alley (30 page)

Except that one of them had got out of it. I could see that one of them—maybe it was Brian—was out, an' crawlin' along somehow. Crawlin' off through the Burren, after me—after I'd left them all to die.

“Jesus, oh Jesus, Johnny, d'ya think any of 'em could still be alive? D'ya think so, Johnny?”

“Christ, what're you on about?”

“We shouldn't a killed that tinker, Johnny. We shouldn't have done that.”

“What're ya goin' on about that for? How do ya know we killed the man?”

Looking around wildly, she saw the eye of the giant, staring back at her from behind the glass in the cabinet of wonders.

“D'ya think that's true? D'ya think maybe we didn't really kill him?”

“How should I know?” He shrugged, and turned away. “But I tell you this: I'd've killed two dozen tinkers to get out of that damned country.”

A bucket of water was splashed upon the fire. Clouds of grey, vinegary smoke billowed up from the settee, choking her where she lay in the stall. Sailors were stomping through the hold, banging on the stalls with their clubs and gaffes—kicking at the half-dead bodies lying there. She had no idea how much time had passed in her fevers, days or weeks or months.

“Up! Up an' out with you, damn ye! This is what you wanted!”

A tar, holding a broad red handkerchief over his nose, stood above them. Kicking at her feet and at Dolan next to her—alive or dead she couldn't tell.

“Get off! You're in Staten Island.
Now
ye'll have to learn to do for yourselves!”

He moved on to the next stall. She felt as weak as a new calf, but the fever had retreated again, and she nudged Dolan, still grey and stiff and motionless in the straw.

“We got to get up now—”

“Why?”

“We're here, an' they need to take the boat back to hell.”

He opened his eyes and rose slowly from the straw. Skinnier now than she had ever seen him, even when they were starving on the road. The skin hanging on him like an old man's. Yet he got to the hatchway before she was even on her knees, his crab's legs carrying him as fast as ever toward the small square of light streaming down into the hold.

“Wait!” he said, one foot on the ladder, just as she had caught up. “We got to go back. We got to bring the cabinet of wonders.”

“How?”

“
We have to,
that's all.”

They went back to the stall—crawling on their hands and knees
now, with no more strength to walk for the moment. The other passengers, those who were left, crawled past them just as slowly. They made it back, though, and she helped Dolan to lift the cabinet up with the last of her strength, and tie it to his back, looping the rope around this chest and stomach. After that they had to rest again, but then they crawled back out and up the ladder—Dolan, carrying the cabinet like a pack mule.

Up on the main deck, the sailors were still yelling and honking at everyone through their handkerchiefs, kicking and pushing the passengers into a line for the small boats. They waited their turn, leaning against the ship's rail on their hands and knees, and looked out at the broad bay before them. All around them was a low ridge of hills. Each of them was brown and desolate, stripped bare of any remaining tree or blade of grass. But at the crest of each one was planted a new white mansion house.

“That's it.”

“That's what?”

“Ameri-kay.”

“Christ!”

When it was their turn, they crawled down the rope ladder and into the small boats. Ruth going first though she was certain she would tumble off—swaying with dizziness, digging her fingers into the rope rungs until they bled. Sustained by the thought of how ridiculous it would be to die now, bashing out her brains on the bottom of a small boat after coming all the way across.

Yet others did die. Losing their grips, they tumbled into the water like so many lead sinkers. Some of them bobbed up again, the sailors cursing some more and fishing them out with their oars. The rest were lost where they had sunk, too fast for anyone even to mark the spot, a few yards off the shore of Staten Island.

The sailors only shouted at the rest of them to hurry up. They rowed them hastily up the muddy beach—then simply turned them out, toppling the passengers onto the mud and rocks like so many eggs off a henhouse roost.

“There ya are now, Columbus! We got plenty more to move—”

They landed on their hands and their knees—men, women, and children, all too weak to stand—and began to crawl slowly up the beach. Moving toward another white mansion, on top of another
hill, the only sign of human habitation. The beach they were crawling through covered with every manner of debris, natural and man-made—empty whiskey and liniment bottles, rags and holey shoes; broken oars, and tin cans, and ship manifests, and spongy masses of kelp and seaweed, and dead jellyfish.

Ruth crawled along beside Dolan, who was still hauling the cabinet of wonders on his back. And as they climbed, she saw a man walking down from the house, toward them. She could see that he was dressed all in black, with a tall, black stovepipe hat upon his head, and with a beard and a face as grim as death.

Ruth thought that he might be coming down the hill to say something to them. She thought, for some reason, that he might be about to offer them his services, or at least to wish them welcome.

But instead the man in the tall black hat walked right through them. He walked right up to the crew at the water's edge, where they were still hard at work, throwing people out of boats, and spoke to the sailors there.

“You fucking English bastards,” he said to them. “You'll kill us all, bringing this scum ashore.”

•
35
•

She lay in the hospital bed, falling in and out of fever. When she was asleep she dreamed that she was still on the ship, and when she was awake she thought that the room smelled even worse, reeking as it did of rotted flesh, and wet molding. Just above her bed there was a hole in the ceiling, and when it rained, which it did frequently, in brief, thunderous bursts, the water would leak down over her feet and pool into an oily slick along the floor.

Her bed was one in a long row of beds, on one side of a long, rectangular room. There was an identical row across the room, facing hers. It was supposed to be the women's ward, but there were men, too—men everywhere, overflowing their own ward, tossing about half naked in their fever. Trying to get into the women's beds with them, arguing and fighting.

Nobody seemed to care. She wasn't exactly sure herself where they were, or who was in charge. Every day, in the morning or the afternoon, some men in uniforms walked through. Tossing stale, wormy biscuits to each of them, picking up their slop buckets and filling the small, round tin pans by their beds with water from a bucket.

The new water was only a little better than the iodine-tainted water on the boat. It was brackish green, the spindly corpses of insects bobbing along the surface. She drank the rainwater when she could, chalky though it was with the taste of plaster, collecting it in her tin pan.

Across the aisle somewhere, she thought, was Johnny Dolan.
If he was still alive—and if he wasn't, she didn't know what she would do, for better or worse.
Once a day, at vespers, the attendants would come back with a stretcher and haul off at least one body that had lain still for a while, quietly stiffened in its bed. He could have been one of them and she would never have known.

“You! You there! Are ya dead or just sleepin'?”

Ruth looked up, at one of the windows across the room, though she could not tell who was speaking, or even if they were speaking to her. The shutters were usually tied closed, but whenever there was a storm they broke free of their tethers, flapping madly about and waking up the whole ward. They were open again now—and through them Ruth could see the high brick wall that ran all the way around the hospital. At night she would watch the moon struggle slowly up over it, and try to judge how much time had passed by its fullness. But she could not remember, she was never sure how full the moon had been when they had arrived in the hospital.

“There! There you are. Look up here!”

Her eyes flickered open again—uncertain if she had dozed for a minute or a week. All she knew was that it was still dark out. She raised her head from her bed, looking for the moon.

Instead there was a face. A goblin face, at least as terrible as Dolan's, but different. It was long and pinched, with a thin nose and bright eyes, and a wide, malicious grin. An oversized head on a wizened body that was, incredibly enough, squatting on the wall outside the open window. She closed her eyes.

“C'mon, c'mon—we got to move now!”

A hand was shaking her roughly. She opened her eyes, expecting to see the face again. Instead it was Dolan—his eyes more clouded with fever than before, no more than black dots in wide yellow ovals. He was throwing the few things she owned up on the bed, telling her to get dressed and come along.

“But you're sick—”

“
C'mon, there's no time!
” the goblin man on the wall was calling in his urgent whisper.

“Trust old Finn, now. You know you won't last in there. There's two more ships already lined up in the Narrows, an' they're just
waitin' for the light to land. Stay here an' you'll have the ship's fever again before noon!”

She got up, knowing he was right. Grabbing up her things—noticing that Dolan still had the black-covered box with him, somehow. And as she did, she realized that her fever had broken again. She still felt weak, and a little jittery, but her head was delightfully cool as she pulled on her clothes. She crossed the hospital floor in a trance, and ascended through the window. The goblin-faced man giving her his hand when she stepped up on a newly emptied bed and hauling her on out—turning back then to help Johnny haul the cabinet through.

“Hullo, what's that then?”

The man who called himself Finn plucked inquisitively at the box with his long, thin fingers, still squatting where he was on the wall.

“Never you mind!” rasped Dolan, scrambling up after it.

“What is it, then?”

“It's a cabinet of wonders.”

Dolan said it reluctantly, even sounding a little embarrassed, but with a trace of pride, too.

“
Is
it, then? Well, y'know, the ferry ain't free,” Finn suggested. “Maybe a wonder or two—”

He pulled up short when he saw the look that Dolan gave him.

“Well, no matter, no matter. There's plenty a time to settle accounts later on.”

He peered down the hill toward the Narrows, where two tall ships loomed like wraiths.

“We got to be gettin' on now, ‘fore the next batch is in.”

The men and women sat in the flatboat in the predawn light. Ruth counted at least a score of them, waiting silently. Their dark shapes hunched forward, toward the bow, as if they were already moving out across the water. The boatman standing just as motionless above them, leaning against the single sail—a thick Dutchman with muttonchop whiskers and a face like a boiled potato, holding the rudder in one hand.

Finn crowded them in, relieving them of their meager possessions as he did, their tied handkerchiefs and bundles.

“Come on now, you won't need that where you're goin'. Don't
burden yourselves with that junk from the old country. It will only slow ya down—”

He let them take the cabinet of wonders, though. They set it in the flatboat, as dark and still as the rest of the passengers, also leaning toward the City. And when the boat was full, the goblin man shoved them off himself, laughing triumphantly, jumping in as they moved away from the land and New York rose up across the harbor.

And it was like nothing I had seen, even in Dublin. All the steeples, and the masts, and the smokestacks and the chimneys belching their black smoke. It was only just morning, but the fires were already lit in a hundred thousand furnaces. The warehouses sitting fat and squat along the river, with their rows of windows like dark, dead eyes, an' the din already comin' over the water to us. There was the bang of hammers, and the roll of wagon wheels, an' the hiss of the whistles an' the steam presses. The cry of a hundred thousand voices, already up an' at work. It was a City full of life, though black was its raiment—

“There she is—the whole Frog an' Toe!”

They were silent, and Finn laughed at them from the back of the boat.

“What's the matter? Ain't you never seen hell before?”

“Is that where we're goin'?”

“'Course it is! Ain't we all fit for hell? All of us that's made it
this
far, anyway.”

The big Dutchman poled them lugubriously on out into the harbor, past a small sandy island with the remains of a rotting wooden fort on it and a hangman's gibbet—the noose still swinging slowly in place. The currents moving faster and faster and the river traffic coming thicker now, until it seemed as if the whole harbor were bearing down upon them. Steamships and paddle wheelers, ferries and schooners. Oystermen and Dutchmen's wives, brigs and sloops, cattleboats and railroad boats, and the aristocrats of them all, the beautiful clipper ships with a single black ball painted on their sleek sails. All of them jostling them with their wakes, or cutting like sharks across their bow, so the boatman had all he could do to keep them afloat. Clamping down grimly on the stem of his pipe, clutching his pole and bracing his feet in the bow as he pushed them heedlessly on, past one
certain wreck after another, until at last they bumped up against the slips of the Chambers Street ferry.

At the docks the goblin man hauled them one by one out of the flatboat, propping them up along the wharf. There they were set upon at once by a gaggle of young boys, quick and furious as jackdaws, trying to pick them clean. They snatched up anything the goblin man had overlooked—money, watches, hats, and coats. Grabbing for their watches, for their rings, those that had them—grabbing at their sexes. Grabbing them all, men and women, trying to haul them away, toward the boardinghouses they worked for.

Finn kept them at arm's length until he could parcel out his cargo. Getting a coin for each, before he sent them off, with one runner or another. His charges waiting as silent and passive as cattle, going wherever they were assigned.

“You're comin' with me, now,” he said at last to Ruth and Dolan, when the others had all been distributed.

She stood where she was, waiting on Johnny Dolan. It was the first time she had ever seen him not sure what to do. Standing there indecisively, eyes red with the
tamh.
Still clutching the cabinet.

“C'mon now! Time's wastin'!”

The goblin man beckoned to them, holding on to a hack that had materialized somehow. The horse snorting and scuffling a hoof impatiently along the paving stones.

“
Ain't
you comin' with me, then? Where else are ya gonna go—but with good old reliable Finn McCool? An' be sure an' bring that box!”

Dolan hunched his shoulders—and pushed on into the open door of the cab, clutching the cabinet to his chest.

“There ya go!”

Finn boosted her in after him, then climbed in himself. He yanked hard on the leather strap that was tied around the driver's leg, and yelled out the window to him.

“Take us to The Sailor's Rest, by the Peck Slip. Make time now!”

And though the driver flicked his reins, we could go no faster than a man walking, but that was all right. For everywhere we went, there was food. There was whole markets full of fish, and eggs, right out in the open, an' wagons passing us full of beer, and sausages, and bleeding red sides of meat, so close you could reach out an' grab them.

But the best thing was the pigs. They ran loose, right out there in the streets—whole herds of pigs, each of them big and round enough to feed a family, runnin' right out in the streets, for anyone fast enough or sharp enough to pick 'em up. And that's when I knew this was a great country.

The hack pulled up by a wooden building that sagged like a wen against its neighbor. Finn McCool jumped down at once—hauling the cabinet of wonders on inside before Dolan could stop him.

“Hey
—hey,
where d'ya think you're goin' with that?”

He scrambled to catch up with him, Finn only grinning innocently.

“Where're we goin'? Why, to your new home, son—to your new home!”

They stood in the back room of The Sailor's Rest, blinking in the smoky darkness. The room itself was nearly bare. There was a large sooty fireplace, and a bar along the back and a strange red curtain that hung over a doorway in the back. The only furniture, though, was a long table and two benches where a couple dozen men and women were clustered—drinking and eating, smoking and singing, and shouting at the top of their voices over a dice game.

“God bless all here!” Finn cried out.

“Ah, go to hell!”

The table erupted in laughter—then the dicers turned back to their game, ignoring them. Finn pushed Ruth and Dolan on into the room.

“Hullo! Here's two more poor unfortunates, brought to safe haven!” he cried out to the bartender, who was a fierce-looking man with a barrel chest and eyebrows that sat on his face like a pair of crows. He only grunted back in reply, staring at the black-draped box that Finn handed across to him.

“What's this, then?” he asked, turning it over in arms that were as thick as tree trunks.

“A cabinet of wonders!” Finn McCool told him grandly. “All the great wonders of the world—or so I'm assured.”