Paradise Alley (49 page)

And just when she felt almost accustomed to it, when she thought that she could nearly accommodate it without being ripped in half, it changed. The pain no longer ragged and searing but a dull, grinding thing now, worse than anything she had ever felt before in her life. Pressing against her back and her spine like some wild creature, trying to burrow its way ever deeper inside her.

“You got to push. You got to push again' it,” one of the women was saying, crouching down by her legs.

Ruth looked down and saw her bare white knees—so terribly pale against the faces of most of the women in the room. All of them here now, it seemed, standing against the walls like the choir in the church.
Some of them moving about urgently, doing things, although she could not imagine what they were. More of them praying or just staring at her. Their faces cringing, or drawn with foreboding, depending upon their own age and experience.

“You got to push it out. Ain't comin' out any other way, you know. Ain't any other way
for
it.”

But the thing inside her only seemed to burrow deeper, as if it were about to burst out her back, and she cried out—screaming in the small, cramped house. Hearing herself, surprised that she could still make such a noise. Thinking,
Of course it would not be that easy, not even to die—

Then she spotted him in the doorway. Her eyes spun wildly around the room again, and there was Billy, head and shoulders above the women. His handsome, copper-red-and-black face more solemn than she had ever seen it—his eyes wild, and red with fear.

She saw him there, and wondered at it. Then the pain had gripped her again, the wild thing still trying to get deeper, and the woman above her knees had shaken her head, her brown face grimacing.

“You must push it past.
You must,
” she insisted.

But it would not come out, whatever it was. It preferred to stay inside and eat out her innards, grinding her backbone to powder. She pushed and she pushed, but she could not dislodge it, and then she let herself sink down and that seemed to ease the pain. Her senses going now, sinking back into her as well, so that she felt herself to be blind, and nearly deaf. She could no longer see the women around her, could barely hear them calling on her to
Push,
and other such fantastical demands.

Instead, she could feel it very close now, the cold currents of the river rising up around her legs. Engulfing her the way they had when the minister dipped her backward, and she welcomed it, she sought to sink deeper.

“Dear Christ Jesus, take her in Your hands—”

She opened her eyes again, to see the little minister by her bedside. Waving the barren cross over her, his pupils burning red again at the imminence of death.
And not even with a real priest, to say a proper prayer over me. Still, it was better than the ocean—

She swung her head back over, toward the other side of the bed—and saw Billy still kneeling there, his face etched in grief. She could
smell the familiar scent of the brandy on his breath—but with such a heavy, deeper sadness in his face now, something beyond the usual tragedy of the drink.

“Don't go,” he whispered to her, his voice barely audible across the pillow. He said it over and over again, a plaintive little whisper, but the most heartfelt words he had ever addressed to her. “Don't go, now.”

She stared at him, amazed that he might actually care if she lived or died. He went on like that for hours—whispering all the usual, desperate things that she had always imagined him telling her. Muttering that he loved her, and that he wanted her to live, and not to leave their boy without his mother—

It would make him unhappy,
she thought, still astonished.
It would make him unhappy, to have me die.

She decided that she should try to live, though she was not sure if she could now. The pain only increasing, somehow, growing worse than anything she could ever have imagined.

There has to be some end,
she thought.
Let's find it.

She pushed back against it—and screamed and screamed. The women leaning hurriedly over, pushing Billy's face out of the way. Running a cloth soaked in laudanum over her lips.

“Here now, here now. Just a little a that, but you got to push.”

“I know,” she said, and the sound of her voice seemed to surprise them.

She pushed again—and the pain was worse yet, reaching whole new parts of her being. Yet she thought she had it now, she thought she understood. The creature in her was hurting, too. It wanted to get out, and she had to help it, she had to ease it out to help the both of them. Pushing slowly, carefully, rolling her body a little. Trying to nurture and comfort it, to enfold it in herself. Giving it one soft push, then a harder one. Trying to coax it, to lure it on out. Pushing again, then halting, then screwing herself up for one great push that hurt so much she was sure it would kill her.

But it didn't, and she started all over again—another little push, a bigger one. On and on, until at last Ruth felt the burrowed creature, the great fist smashed against her backbone, begin to recede. Her spine springing back into place, so that she was able to get a grip on the wild creature now—to push more firmly and easily, reassuring it all the time
in her mind. Until at last she could look down and see there, between her gawky, skinny white legs, the midwife holding up her baby.

A boy, Billy was right.
As dark-skinned as his father, black against her pale white legs. She cried to see him as they gently wiped him off with a cloth and laid him on her chest.
So pretty and sweet and black—
and with Billy still beside her, whispering things into her ear. So that she could not help but cry, and wonder how it was that she should have lived to see this.

•
51
•

That was the best time between them, those next few years in the village. It was nearly the only time that she could remember not having to try to get away from someone or something.

How any one time, any span of years or months, could be the best time of one's life and then end—

It had taken her a long while to convalesce fully from the hurt, from the tears in her body, but after a few weeks she was able to limp around the house, doing what she could. When she was well enough, she went back to tilling the vegetable plot, and helping to harvest the wheat field. Walking down to the river with the other women again to do the washing, the musseling and the fishing in the shallows with their hemp nets.

There was cider and beer to be made in the autumn, and syrup in the winter; evenings bottling preserves and salting meat, and quilting at the church house. She knew how to do almost none of this, they had been too poor even for such homely things. Learning it from the other women as she went along, abjectly grateful for their help, their instruction—realizing all over again how ignorant she was. She knew almost nothing of value besides the sewing her mother had taught her, and how to haul the kelp and plant potatoes. Glad now to learn everything she could, even happy to stand and sing the strange hymns with the rest in the African church.

Best of all, Billy was delighted with her, with the son she had given him. He liked to see the child whenever he could, to look in on him when he was sleeping, and spy on him playing out in the fields. Jiggling him on his knee when he came home from the orphans', laughing at everything he said and marveling at what a bright boy he was. They had him christened in the clapboard church, the Reverend Betancourt dunking him rather harshly, she thought, in the baptismal bowl, so that he sobbed and sobbed. But his father was beaming, naming him Milton after his own father, who had made the middle passage.

“He's smart like him, smart enough to get away,” Billy told her, with that practical fierceness she had seen in him before, and that always frightened her a little. “One day he'll leave here, never see us again.”

The child had also given Billy the chance to build another room on the house. Glad to have the chance to pull out his carpenters' tools, salvaging the wood from old abandoned fences and houses up past the northern fields. The money was tighter, but they were able to get by with her job at the German ladies'. Carrying Milton along on her back—surprised and disturbed though she was by the shouts of derision they suffered from any passing Irish and German workmen, or the conductors on the Fourth Avenue rail line.

“
Whore! Whore! Nigger-lovin' whore!
” they would call out from the railing of the last car when she happened to pass behind it.

“Get yourself a real, honest workingman, ya lousy gooh!”

Ruth was amazed at their ferocity—the trainmen only having glimpsed her for a moment from the moving car, already receding down the track toward the Grand Central Station. She was baffled that they could be so different from the men on the Harlem line, who still waved and whistled to the women as they lay out in the grass.

Mrs. Krane and Mrs. Mueschen, at least, had been delighted with the baby. Letting Ruth hold and nurse him as she worked—so long as she did not stop turning out the rag-and-bone dolls for them. And Milton was always glad, even then, just to be close to her. He was an almost unnaturally amiable child, his head coming up, a broad smile across his face whenever he heard her voice.

When he got older the German ladies let him play in his own piles of scraps, and imitating his mother he would put together remarkably adroit—and saleable—toys and dolls of his own. Ruth marveled at his dexterity, and told herself that he must have his father's skills.

“Someday ye'll build a ship yourself. A ship like none they ever saw,” she would croon to him, holding him tightly to her.

When she could she took him down to the docks and the shipyards along the East River, to see the boats building there. And when she did—when she saw the marvelous, white keels taking shape—she had some understanding of why Billy felt such a pride in the thing, and why its loss wounded him so.

Yet she did not take Milton back. Before she had gone a hundred yards down the docks, she discovered that she was fair game for any men there, the sailors and shipbuilders and longshoremen, sailmakers or boardinghouse runners alike. They grabbed at her with every step, calling out their obscene threats.

“Hey, girlie, what's that nigger doll ya got there? Put him down, I'll give ye a better one—”

“Come here now, Molly, I'll give you the hair a
that
dog!”

Groping brazenly at her breasts and her buttocks, trying to jostle and shove her down blind alleys, or in through doors of the saloons. Ruth was unnerved by their ferocity, thinking at first that it must be something in the nature of their profession. Soon, though, she understood that it was the fact that she had the boy with her. Mortified that she had not figured it out before, that she had put her baby in such peril.

That was what the railmen had been on about as well. It was the child that enraged them. Their righteous feeling that any woman so desperate and depraved as to diddle a nigger should be happy for their trade—

She was thankful, at least, that they were tucked way up in Seneca Village, among their
own.
They would lie in bed at night and hear the sounds of twigs breaking in the woods, and the low growl of the neighbor's dog, and she would know that the menacing shadows outside were real. The slavecatchers still loitering around Seneca Village, to see what they might find—

She had clutched her baby tighter to her chest, knowing that even he could be taken. The blackbirders had no compunction about who they carried off, whether they were escaped slaves or freed men, children or adults. The people in the village, black and white, kept an eye out for each other, but all it took was one slip, one moment, and they might vanish into the trees, never to be seen again.

And if we did not think on Dolan more, if we did not worry about him as much as we should have, it was only because we knew we were already as safe
as we could be anywhere else. Besieged up there, in the Nigger Village, for better or for worse.

Before long she found that she was pregnant again. She was not so apprehensive or so fateful about it this time—knowing what it meant now, the pain she would have to expend. She was even able to put on a little bit of weight, which Billy liked to tease her about. Not enough that she wasn't still skinny—the possibility of any true fatness having been burned out of her once and for all, back on the Burren, and the road—but that she did not look as if she were actively starving, and he would call her his big woman, his Mother Rock.

And this time it did go easier. She did not feel the cold tide creeping up her—though she knew it was still there, abiding, just out of reach. This time only half a day was required before she gave birth to a girl they named Lillian. She was longer and skinnier than her brother at first, her skin a shade or two lighter as well, as all the others would be. And Billy had been delighted in the girl, too, she was relieved to see—not quite as ecstatic as he had been with his son, but still very happy.

A few weeks later, on a Sunday off from the orphanage, Billy had tracked up into the woods again, looking for lumber he could use to rig yet another room up to their spreading house. He came back with a load of fine, first-rate boards along his shoulders, but a wary look on his face.

“From the German place,” he had explained. “That man up there with the goats.”

And she had known exactly what he meant. The little estate with its meticulous German brick walls. Its unswerving, orderly lines of vegetables and fruit trees had been as permanent as anything they knew, up in the still undemarcated wilds of Bloomingdale. The eccentric name that he had read to her once, chiseled into the bronze plaque on the wall:
Jupiter K. Zeuss, Prop.

“An' he didn't mind it?”

“He's all gone. All he took was his goats an' his furniture. An' no one else moved in to claim it.”

“Well, maybe he passed suddenly,” she said, though she could scarcely credit it herself. If there was one thing she knew, it was that real estate did not go wanting in New York. “Maybe that was it, poor soul—”

But soon the word got 'round that the German had been evicted, so that at last the City could build the new park, and a sense of foreboding settled over the village.

There had been rumors about the park for years, and stories in the papers, but no one had thought it would ever be built. It had seemed too absurd an idea, even for the City.
To tear down people's homes and gardens, just so other people could walk around in the grass and the trees, and breathe the open air.
Everyone had just assumed it was politics, and that if it were built at all, it would be over in Jones's Wood, or down on the Battery, where the codfish aristocracy preferred to take the air.

Yet less than a month after Billy found the German's place deserted, a man had come from the sheriff's office, to speak in the churches. Ruth had recognized him at once. It was the same little man with a too-big head who had perched on the wall outside the hospital on Staten Island, and tried to steal Dolan's cabinet of wonders. The man with the terrible goblin face,
Finn McCool—

He had come up in the world since she had seen him last. Looking very important now, with a wide red sash across his waistcoast and the colored cane that the City leaders carried on official business. Telling them with the same easy grin she remembered that they, too, were to be evicted, and that all of their own homes, and the little schoolhouse, and both the village churches were to be torn down, and plowed under to make way for the landscaping of the new park.

They were shocked into silence at first—by the grin on his face, by the matter-of-factness of his tone as much as anything. Then the whole church had erupted in protest, the men and women both, standing and shouting at him in their pews. Other men tried to rush the pulpit, and push their way past the burly shoulder hitters he had been prudent enough to bring along. Even the Reverend Betancourt was shouting, she could see—slapping his hand down repeatedly on his Bible, as if trying to prove a theological point.

McCool had stood his ground where he was, above them in the pulpit. Still grinning and raising his hands for silence.

“Now, now! No property owners will be evicted without payment!” he cried out over the tumult. “Anyone what can produce a legal deed for their property will be compensated to the full extent, thanks to the generosity of the Common Council!”

This announcement only stayed the congregation for a moment. Then they were shouting again:

“A deed!
A deed!
”

“There never was no deeds! This was swampland—this was just the woods!”

“Shame! Shame!”

Finn McCool only shrugged and grinned again, climbing spryly on down from the pulpit and pushing his way quickly out the back door of the church, with his shoulder hitters. The villagers still raging, though they soon subsided, and filed numbly out of the church when they saw that they had only each other to appeal to.

“Do ya have a deed, then?” Ruth had asked Billy, as gently as she could, when they walked back to the house. Already knowing the answer from the look upon his face.

“No. Nobody ever needed any deed before. Nobody even said a
thing.
”

His voice baffled and bitter but not quite outraged, like that of a man who had been done terrible wrong before and expected no better from the future.

Ruth had been carrying Lillian in her arms, and Billy had Milton riding on his shoulders. They had walked down the rest of the lane in silence, and stopped in front of the little white house he had built, and added on to so carefully for them. She remembered looking at it in the dusk there, and thinking that this was how the time ends—