Paradise Alley (52 page)

Outside there was a constant drizzle, the wind lashing the water into people's faces, and she had wandered aimlessly through the streets. Past all the shooting galleries that had sprung up since the war, blazing and pinging away on the Bowery. Gazing dully up at a free-
and-easy hall near Grand Street, its huge, red banner flapping in the cold breeze:
Who Complains of Hard Times?

Who indeed? If it is your duty, we can manage—

Near Tenth Street she had noticed a small crowd gathered around a shop window and wandered over to see what they were staring at. There, in the window, was a remarkably small, grey felt cap. Shaped so much like the one Tom himself had been wearing, the last time she had seen him—

“
Cap of a Secession Officer,
” she had read on the sign beneath it there—and then, just above the bill, slightly off to one side, she had made out a little, drunken circle, like the hole a cigar might burn through it.

Most of the crowd turned away without saying anything, lowering their eyes. A few hard cases exclaiming, “
Good!
” or “
Thus ever to traitors!
” But Deirdre had kept staring at the little, wobbly hole, no bigger than her thumbnail.

“
Heaven be his bed,
” she had murmured at last and crossed herself, plunging back into the hueless streets.

She had spent the rest of the day walking, in a fog. She could as easily have ended up in the river, she thought later on, and she was sure that it was only the love of her children and the intervention of the Blessed Virgin that had sustained her.
That—and the hope that he might still be alive.

She had just gotten inside when there was a knock. There on her door stone was Ruth, her face lined with worry and pity, obviously having heard the news from someone on the alley. Deirdre was touched by the gesture—but still suspicious, even then, of her concern over Tom.

“Oh, Deirdre. Oh, I'm so sorry to hear it—” Ruth had started to say. “Have ye heard anything—”

“No more than anybody else on this block,” Deirdre had told her, despising her pity. Unwilling to let Ruth claim any part of her Tom.
There is nothing, nothing at all you can give me. Not even your sympathy.

“Well, then.” Ruth had shuffled her feet, not knowing what else to say. “Well, if there's anyt'ing I can do to be of help—”

“Thank you very much. Very much obliged, I'm sure,” Deirdre had told her. Shutting the door as abruptly as she could.

Blaming her, blaming Ruth for it still as much as herself.
For getting Tom mixed up in all that business. For bringing her halftone family down to this block. For getting rid of her brother—

Hanging on to her pride still, despite all the prayers she had said on the way home. Blinking back the tears, but with her head unbowed and her back straight as she went in to tell the children. Feeling the little scrap of paper in her glove, hanging on to Tom, in the palm of her hand.

•
53
•

“The whole City's on fire, that's what I hear.”

“I heard the rebs snuck a regiment up, rose in the middle of the night—”

“You know the North River's full of gunboats, just waitin' to open up!”

Tom listened dully to the soldiers' stories as the train rocked slowly across the bridge to Camden. Sitting jammed against one wall of the boxcar, without enough room to so much as stretch his leg out. The car reeking of its last inhabitants, which he guessed from the smell of them would have been pigs.

“There won't be a
thing
left standin', once those boys let 'em have it!” a private exulted.

“
Shut
it, will ya,” one of the veterans told him.

“What?”

The man's voice sounding hurt.
A Westerner,
Tom guessed, from the sound of it.
And young.
Some farmer's boy, from the plains of Iowa or Illinois, blown all this way east by the war.

“I was just sayin' what would happen when the gunboats open up—”

“I said,
shut it.
Just stop yer puffin'.”

The second voice—the voice of the veteran—was more familiar. Many of those in the car, Tom knew, were drawn from New York regiments—
his own 69th, and the 88th, and the 63rd, all of Meagher's Irish Brigade. Thinking of their own homes, now—just as he was worried to distraction over Deirdre and the children, stuck in the middle of whatever the hell was going on up there.

It makes a difference, in your own yard.
Tom felt a stray jolt of sympathy for the rebs, fighting nearly the whole damned war over their own fields and homes. He had seen what an army could do to a town before, when they had encamped across the river above Fredericksburg last winter. After a few weeks the place had barely been inhabited. Whole blocks shelled into smoking ruins. Bummers and deserters, looting everything they could find. Citizens shot on sight by patrols that took them for reb snipers—

But now it was
his
home. He had hardly believed it when the muster sounded, just a few hours ago, though it seemed like months. The morning in the Invalids camp proceeding at its usual sluggish pace. The wounded settling in for another blessed day of just trying to stay out of the sun. Serenading the sick-call bugler with one of their typical, mocking songs:

Are you all dead? Are you all dead?

No, thank the Lord there's a few left yet,

There's a few—left—yet!

Minutes later had come the call to arms. Snatchem looking at Tom in amazement, he and the rest of his little raiding party, Feeley and Larkins, still bleary-eyed, and bloated with fresh chicken and sweet potatoes roasted in the crossroads the night before.

But there was no mistaking the call. They had gone scrambling for their Springfields and haversacks, some of them still pulling up their pants, thinking that Bobby Lee must have doubled back and was about to descend upon them.
Nobody wanting to end up in a Confederate prison camp, they had all heard enough stories of what that was like—

Instead a potbellied little colonel with his leg shot off below the knee had stumped back and forth before their ranks.

“The whole town of New York is gone up in rebellion,” he told them, nodding his head in sudden, rooster-like movements. “Which of you fine Invalids wants to put down a mob?”

Tom had stepped forward at once, Snatchem right beside him.
Followed quickly by Feeley, who had taken a ball through his shoulder but could still steady a rifle in his elbow, and Larkins, who had only been shot in the foot.
All the fellas that was left from the Black Joke, shot to hell though they were.

Most of the other New Yorkers had stepped forward as well—those who could still limp along, at least, and shoulder a piece. Instantly clamoring to get back, to find out what was happening to their wives and children and parents.

“Discipline will be maintained at all times,” the colonel had warned, mistaking their enthusiasm. “There will be no goin' off on some spree of your own, or usin' this duty for leave!”

They had ignored him. What the New York men wanted was to see their families, and know that they were safe. Talking about it quietly among themselves, as the train wound its way slowly east and north from the country junction where they had boarded. Trying to assure each other it was overblown, that the rubes didn't know what a riot was.

But at the station in Philadelphia, Tom had watched as the 26th Michigan, and the City's own 7th New York, boarded the train. No Invalids, but crack regiments, pulled from the line, and the chase for Lee.

It must be serious,
he had realized then.
They must be worried, to pull back troops when they have a chance to end the whole war.

Followed by another thought—one that he had had so many times already but that came home to him with renewed force now, stuck in this boxcar.

What was he doing here? Why wasn't he home already, where he belonged?

They crossed the Delaware into New Jersey at Camden. The train chugging its way slowly across the low coastal plains, past salt marshes and cranberry farms, and dense forests of pitch pine and shortleaf and cedar. The soldiers knocked holes in the boxcar sides to get air, but that made things only a little cooler, and in no way dispelled the reek of pig.

Near Toms River the gauge on the line changed, and they had to get off and climb into a new boxcar—this one used most recently by cattle. From there they were shunted onto sidings again and again, making way for supply trains and troop trains that rambled past
them, on toward the South. Once he even saw a regular passenger train from the Lackawanna line rocking slowly on by. The men and women inside gazing incuriously back out the windows of the parlor car. They looked prosperous and well-fed, their eyes complacent—as if there were no war, anywhere, much less in the nation's greatest city.

Just like the army. Shipping soldiers back and forth, right past each other. Such a terrible crisis that we have to make way for the shoddy merchants and their wives.

At a water stop they were allowed out to stretch their legs, and eat a quick ration of fat pork on hardtack. George had foraged some sugar from somewhere to smear on the pork, so it wasn't too bad. Sitting along the rail embankment, Tom could see a gaggle of officers up by the engine, hovering over the latest telegrams passed down the line, making agitated gestures.

So the elephant really has hit town.
And again:
What am I doing here?

Back inside the boxcar grew steadily darker, streaked with hazy bars of afternoon sunlight as they chugged up the Jersey coast. Moving through small, white towns that ignored them, no one so much as looking up as the train passed by. The air was still as thick as chowder, most of the men nodding in and out of sleep despite their anxiety. George lay next to him, his head fallen on his shoulder. Feeley and Larkins snoring loudly, their mouths tilted toward the sky.

Tom might have slept himself but his calf muscle cramped up again. He rubbed at it with both hands, feeling the new matching scars on either side of the leg.
No worse than what a man could do dropping his razor in the morning, and just as straight.
Even the scar below his breast, from Fredericksburg, no more than a puckered hole now, the size of a nickel—at least in the front. A good deal bigger in the back, where the ball had exited, he knew—but still not nearly the size he would have expected, for all the damage it had done.

It don't take much to kill a man. Just a little hole, big enough to let the air or the blood out.

He had seen it often enough. Men who had an artery nicked, or were shot through the lung. The life just seeping out of them.
And the question again—why should he have ever taken part in such a thing?

Deirdre Dolan, singing to the wheel. He remembered the old proverb:
A whistling woman or a crowing hen was never good for God or men.

He had stood on a street corner, that fall before the war, watching in silence with the rest of the ward as the Wide-Awakes paraded up the Fifth Avenue. Ten thousand of them, at least, tramping through the crisp October night. Each one carrying a torch, dressed in identical black-and-silver military capes and hats. Marching up the avenue in lockstep, like some dreadful, inhuman machine.

They were thuggish young rich men's sons, most of them. Their cheeks flushed and their eyes blurred from the drink. Rabbit sports he had seen a dozen times before, on their slumming expeditions, picking fights and retching in alleys along the Bowery. Bellowing out their marching songs now, as if daring anyone to object:

Hurrah for the choice of the nation,

Our chieftain so brave and so true,

We'll go for the great reformation,

For Lincoln and Liberty, too!

It had been a nervous, agitated time, that October. Men were marching all over the City, and there was a feeling that something was bound to happen—the same feeling that the fire companies got when there was smoke in the air. A week later the Democrats had had their own parade for Douglas, and all the workingmen and women from the lower wards had turned out—three times the showing of the Wide-Awakes' parade, going on until well past midnight, with everyone carrying lanterns, and the
b'hoys
shooting off Roman candles.

By far the biggest parade that fall, though—the biggest sensation in the City—was to celebrate the visit of the Prince of Wales. All the fire companies had taken part, six thousand men in all, with their machines in tow. Singing “Solid Men to the Front” as they passed the balcony of the Fifth Avenue Hotel where the prince stood—a slim, elegant figure in his Coldstream Guards uniform, smiling or bowing graciously in response.

Tom had never seen such a spectacle. The paint job on every engine or hose wagon touched up for the occasion, with fantastic new scenes added by Professor A. P. Moriarty himself, the finest of all the fire-engine painters.

There had been the Old Honey Bee, with an illuminated gold hive swinging between the brakes. The Silk Stockings, with their silver
dolphin fittings and their painting of guardian angels hovering over a sleeping child on the hose reel. Shouting out their rallying cry,
Come, ye Old Silver Nine!
as they passed.

There was the Old Turk with its tantalizing harem scene, and the snooty Yankees from the Amity Hose, with their red running lamps shaped like pineapples and mounted in solid gold. There were the Quills of the Oceana—a company of merchants and clerks who kept notably ponderous minutes of their meetings—and the Old Blue Box, with its depiction of Jefferson signing the Declaration, chanting
True Blue never fades!
as they came. There was the Niagara, with its painting of the falls, and a volcano at sea; and the Lafayette, with Rip Van Winkle wandering out of the Catskills after his long sleep. The Iron Horse and the Man-Killer, and the White Ghost, which always maintained it was the fastest engine in the City when in fact it never was. The Shad Bellies, and the Dashing Half Hundred, and the Bean Soup and the Mutton House and the Live Oak, and the Old Sal and the Old Jeff, and the Mazeppa company with its hose reels that featured nothing less than a depiction of Hope, and Washington's camp at Valley Forge, and incidents from the life of Mazeppa, and a fireman at his hydrant, and the City's coat of arms, and the New York Institution for the Blind.

Tom was there as well, marching with the Black Joke. Engine Company 33,
Old Bombazula.
Dressed in his proud red shirt, and black cap, pants, and suspenders, the black ribbons hanging from the back of his tarpaulin hat with “33” etched in gilt on the end. The wagon with its shimmering new coat of black paint and gold stripes running the length of its sides. Professor Moriarty's proud picture of the privateer
Black Joke
on one side of the box, and a great prairie fire, ripping across the plains, on the other. And on the front was their motto
—THE NOBLEST MOTIVE IS THE PUBLIC GOOD.