Paradise Alley (79 page)

Sgt. Dove . . . .”

She hadn't known how to tell Milton. Aware that he read the newspapers, too, and that even if he hadn't, he would have heard it soon enough from the other children, even the men and women in Paradise Alley. Finally she had laid it right out before him on the kitchen table.
Showing him the lists because she could not bear to say it out loud. She could not even think of
what
to say, with his name there under
Missing.
At least that was one she had never had to suffer with Tom—

“I have to find him,” he had said at once, after he had read his father's name there.

“You can't—”

“I have to go down and find him.”

“You can't, you could never find him down there in all that,” she had pleaded with him.

Deirdre was never sure what to make of the boy. He seemed to have healed as well as he could. She thought that he seemed quieter, though—more somber, which she could understand. She would catch him thinking on things, just staring out an upstairs window into space. He had nightmares when he would wake up shouting his mother's name, jumping up out of bed, and the whole household would be aroused, all the children crying and screaming before she could get them back into bed.

Yet she did not know what she would do without him. Things were harder now than ever, with so many children to look after, and Deirdre scarcely had time to take in any work. Milton helped her in any way he could, as smart and reliable as ever. Minding the younger children when they were all down with another run of the measles, or the smallpox. Sticking his ear in anywhere and getting what work he could find—

She was aware, too, that he got his own letters from his father. Deirdre had heard almost nothing from Billy, since his enlistment—just a line or two, enclosed with his soldier's pay. But she did not know what he was writing his son, and from the moment he had left, she had worried about this day, fearful that Milton would simply light out for the South.

“I know what you and your Da talked about,” she told him. “But I need you here, and you still won't find him. The best you can do is stay and wait for him here, the way you did before, during the riot.”

He had nodded then, and excused himself and gone upstairs. But the next morning she had heard him go out early, closing the door very quietly as he left. She had run down the stairs after him at once, throwing a shawl around her shoulders, crying for Eliza to watch over the children.

Deirdre had run all the way down to the Battery, where the recruiting tents were pitched. So afraid that she would lose him.
They took so many his age now,
she knew.
Not only for drummer boys, but to put right in the line—

She had combed through all the recruiting stations after him, pushing her way past the barkers from the upstate cities, and the taunting gang
b'hoys,
the poor men offering themselves up for substitutes, and the Copperhead politicians stumping against the war. Searching frantically among them all, until at last she had come upon the largest tent in Battery Park—and the long line of Negro men, winding down the promenade.

Milton had looked embarrassed and a little ashamed as she tried to pull him away. Deirdre pleading openly with him, not caring who was looking or what they said.

“We need you. We need you for all those children. Who will look after them, if you don't?”

“I'm a man, now,” he told her, but his voice was shaky. “It's not a man's job to look after the children.”

“I'm speaking to you like a man, now. Who will do it if you don't? Who will if he never comes back?” she said, though she had not wanted to say it out loud. Crossing herself as she went even further:

“What if my Tom doesn't come back, either? Who will help with them, then? Who will make a man's wages for them to live on?”

Milton had let her pull him out of the line, then. Agreeing to stay on, to help. Looking away from her, as though he were still ashamed—though when he looked back, she saw that his eyes were full of tears.

“I didn't really want to go,” he confessed to her. “I told him I would, I would do my duty, but I didn't want to.”

“No, no,” she said, comforting him as they walked back up the shilling side of Broadway. “We have a duty, too, those of us who just abide.”

It was true, too, she did not know what she would have done without him. There were not only the children now, but Maddy Boyle, as well, who was little better than a child. Deirdre had found her in an alley off Pearl Street. She had been sitting up against a wall, covered in filth. Her dress in tatters, barely able or willing to talk at all.

Deirdre was never sure just what had happened to her, if the mob had caught up with her or if she had finally gone out of her head. All she knew was that the great Colt revolver she had delighted in so much was nowhere to be found, and Maddy did not look as if she had bathed in weeks.

Since then she had improved somewhat, at least—though Deirdre felt in her less charitable moments that she was running an invalid soldiers' home. Yet within a few weeks she was speaking a little more, and smiling sometimes, and after a while she could even be trusted to do simple tasks, such as watching the dinner, or minding the younger children.

For all her old pride, though, Maddy would not go back to her house. She even refused to claim what was left of her possessions, only shying away from the windows when she saw the gentleman who had kept her coming down the street.

The man had been bold enough to come to their door, asking about her, but Deirdre had told him to his face that she had no idea where the girl might be. He had looked her over carefully, clearly not believing her; no doubt he had been told something.
Oh, this block.
But she had stared him down, and he had gone on. She knew that he had kept the lease—the house still sitting empty, as if waiting for Maddy. But she would not go back.

Sometimes, too, she thought about Johnny. Making herself pray for his soul, though she could not think that it would do any good. For she did not forgive him.

At first, in the days and weeks after the riot, she had worried that he might come back, still trying to extract some kind of revenge for all that had been inflicted upon him. Yet as the months went by she began to think that he was gone for good this time. She hadn't thought where
—just gone, as if hell itself had opened up, and swallowed him down.

And then in such moments she would try to think on what it must have been like, with the whole family dying, back in the Cork poorhouse. She tried to think of him again as her bright, wild boy, the child she had cared for when she was little more than a child herself, and to imagine how it was that he had become what he was. But she could not forgive him.

Much more, she thought of Tom. Praying for him, and writing to him every night, even when she was so tired the letters swam before her eyes. They had had such a short time together in the City, after the riot. He had been able to stay with her for only a few nights before he had to go on back to the war, back to his regiment, still chasing Bobby Lee down into Virginia.

It had felt like a nighttime visitation, like something that she was barely sure at times had happened at all.
To be in his arms again, to hold his precious face, gaunt and bearded as it was.

Then he was gone—and for weeks afterward, she thought that her seeing him meant he was going to die, for certain. Her conviction mounting, through all the terrible battles that butcher Grant had waged over the last year and a half, throwing his men's lives away like they were so many trifles—

Yet she had been wrong again, trying to outguess God. Tom had come home again, on several weeks' leave, though this had been even more painful than his first visitation. Deirdre had agonized over when he would have to go again, nearly as soon as he was home. Seeing it in Tom's eyes, too, the anticipation that corroded every moment between them.

How men went to war, she didn't know. But how they went back, she could not fathom at all.

Yet in the last few months since, she had come to hope again. Trying to think of the words that Father Knapp had read to her—“
I require mercy, not a sacrifice
”—on those days when she could still imagine the existence of a merciful God at all. Her best part of the day had been the afternoons, when she would go out into the street for a few minutes. Checking the post box for the letters from Tom, from the trenches before Richmond. All of them routine and loving now, trying to reassure her. The war still winding down so slowly, agonizingly, during the great, final siege of the reb capital—though she was grateful for that, too, happy that there was less fighting now.

When the end finally came, she had been ecstatic. Her joy was all but undiminished even by the news of Lincoln's murder in the theatre. It was a terrible thing, she knew, she would have to do penance for the indifference of her heart, but all she could think was,
Tom—Tom was finally coming home for good.

Until, that was, she had gone upstairs one evening to find Milton
with an old campaign map he had saved from one of the newspapers. His eyes shining with determination as he plotted his trip down to Cold Harbor, as soon as he could.

“I've got to go find him,” he had told her. “If he's still to be found, I will find him.”

•
81
•

He is coming.

They made Hoboken station at five that morning, the train wheezing and shuffling into the station like an old bull driven into the East River yards. They reached the platform and it sat there for a little while more, huge and black and mysterious. The window curtains all pulled shut, shreds of black crepe still hanging from its sides. The engine puffing white clouds of smoke into the cavernous, copper-green depot before the engineer cut the steam and the brakes let out one last long hiss.

Sergeant Thomas O'Kane shoved open the door of the coffin car and swung himself down to the platform, bending both knees to favor the leg that still pained him from Gettysburg. He shouldered his rifle and stood at attention, saluting Colonel Pennybacker as he came down the car steps. The rest of the honor guard hustling down right after, already washed and polished and dressed for parade, as he knew they had been for hours. Wanting, like the engineer, to make sure they got everything right.

He is coming. He returneth to us now.

It had taken them a long time to come this far, winding their way slowly north from Washington City. Through the Pennsylvania fields, and the Piedmont foothills, the single track across the dismal Jersey meadowlands. Retracing much of the same route Tom had traveled,
nearly two years before, on his way to save the City for the Union. Not shunted aside for any passenger lines this time, but stopping at each whistlestop and town. Longer layovers in the cities, at Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and even Baltimore, that Se-cesh town
he
had had to skulk through in disguise, on the way to his first inauguration, the Pinkertons fearing for his life.

Now they all came out to mourn—to
see,
and to say that they had seen. The townsmen at their proud little sandstone stations. The stout Dutch farmers beside their crackerjack barns, and bull-chested horses. The oystermen and the fishermen, by their estuaries in the Chesapeake and the Schuylkill, the Delaware and the Susquehanna. Little clumps of black men and women, standing along the rails in deserted clearings, in the middle of nowhere, as if they might be set upon for displaying their grief too openly even in the middle of New Jersey.

Tom watched them all, from the corner of his eye, standing guard at one corner of the casket during his long hours of duty. Watching openly through the black-draped windows when he was off duty.

There was, after all, nothing else to do. No card playing, or singing, or any of the drinking or the rough, ironic conversation with which they usually killed their long soldiers' hours off the line. No one even smoking, nothing more than a chaw or two to keep them going. Peeking out the curtained windows at the wood and brick villages, the praying Negroes, standing, holding hands along the rail clearings in the middle of the night.

We are coming, Father Abraham,

One half a million strong—

They lined up in parade formation on the platform. Rifles grounded in front of them, legs splayed out, eyes right. The crowd before them filling the station, the narrow platform just inches from where they stood. The good citizens of Hoboken town and their families. Mechanics and merchants, shipbuilders and ironmongers. Dressed up in their best church clothes, gaping up at the murky bulk of the coffin mounted in the last car.

So different from the last time he had been here. And so long.
The station filled then with desperate, ravaged Negroes. The City burning, across the river.

And all that had gone on since then.
So many more lost. Thinking then, in the days after Gettysburg, that the war must be nearly over. Never suspecting that the worst days, the most bloody and continual slaughter still lay ahead, back down in the fields and trenches of Virginia.

Danny Larkins, shot through the head in the murk and chaos of the Wilderness. Feeley, cut down before the breastworks at the Bloody Angle, at Spotsylvania. And then there was George Leese—Snatchem—doing thirty days in the guardhouse back in Washington City, for stealing a chicken from the backyard of a senator.

And he himself, remarkably still intact somehow. Nicked in the ear by a bullet at the Hare House, his cap shot off his head and another bullet through the fleshy part of his thigh just a few weeks before, during the fight for Sutherland Station. That last wound not even hurting anymore, much to his amazement—having passed straight through his flesh and blood as if he were made of no more than the ether now.
A wound that would not even make the casualty lists,
he hoped.

“All right,” Colonel Pennybacker harrumphed now. “All right, men!”

His face pale with responsibility, eyes wide behind his little silver spectacles. Not a year out of West Point. The thin line of his first beard just rimming his chin but already a seasoned veteran, Tom knew, twice shot out of his saddle. All of them experienced and decorated men in the honor guard, soldiers and tars selected from representative states of the Union for this leg of the journey. Yet all of them just as nervous and pale as the young colonel; this was simply too big for any of them.

“Ready now! All at once—”

This was the part they hated most of all. Bringing down the coffin, transferring it to whatever new train or ferryboat awaited. The oaken casket heavy, and long, of course. They had to move the whole catafalque because, after all, they couldn't just set
him
down on the platform. As it was they were terrified of letting it slip and tumble to the ground, the murdered President rolling out before them.

What would that be like?

Old Abe himself, tumbling out of his shroud. They had all seen worse things, of course—much worse. They had seen fields so thick with writhing men that they looked like maggots on a horse's head.
They had seen bodies stacked like firewood, waiting for the ambulance corps to cart them away, and men's skulls blown apart, and whole buckets of severed arms and legs, sticking out willy-nilly next to the surgeons' tents.

But this would be something else again, a nearly unfathomable defilement.

We are coming, Father Abraham. And how many shades, coming with him? All the years of slaughter. The whole brigade, killed many times over, cut down and reorganized, again and again with fresh boys, fresh recruits.

The dead so many they could easily be laid out from here to Washington City. Jackknifed along a thousand fences and trees, roads and woods and city streets—

“Easy now!”

They lowered his body down, out of the carriage. Pennybacker hovering about them, hopping from one foot to the other, unable to help himself. All of them breathing a sigh of relief when the casket was down, and remounted on the catafalque. Shuffling slowly on down the crowded platform then, out to the waiting funeral barge. Actually pretty good at this by now, learning how to carry the dead.

He is coming.

The City spread out for him across the broad, grey river. The way he had come to it then, during that bitter week nearly two years before. No smell of burning now, but the usual tang of coal and brine, fish and smelting metal. The town slowly emerging from the morning mists—blackened, piercing steeples. The brown, rectangular blocks of factories and warehouses—and the dense stockade of masts, all around them.

Where she is.

He stood near the prow of the barge, forgetting his discipline for just a moment. Rubbing one hand absently over the thick brown beard he had grown, now tinged with grey. Wondering at how old he must look now. Wondering what she would think to see him coming back here like this
—if
she saw him, he had not had time to write her before being plucked from the ranks for the funeral guard.

Sergeant Tom O'Kane, coming back on the President's funeral guard. Jesus, but that was a thing!

Standing proudly in the barge, scarcely able to believe it himself,
but most of all just wanting to be home.
Remember yourself now.
Eyes front, staring straight ahead at the City as the tars rocked them slowly over through the swift, deceptive currents of the Hudson.

She is there, waiting,
he thought.
And the rest of them. My family.

When he had come back to the block, on that terrible day nearly two years before, he had held her and held her, out in the street, until the captain had finally made him push on with the rest of their makeshift detail. He had managed to finagle a few nights back with her, and the family, before they had to leave the City. Back again for only a few weeks' leave the next fall, after the terrible losses they had sustained, and all the men from the Irish Brigade had been given leave to go home, and make recruiting speeches for their regiments.

How he had hated that duty.
Not wanting to convince any man they should take part in the slaughter he had endured. Some of the
b'hoys
had come 'round, cursing and hooting at them from the back of the crowd, but most of what he saw before him were young faces—black and white, milling around before the speaker's platform, staring curiously up at him and the other veterans in their dress uniforms. And he had stood there, not knowing what to say. Not wanting to talk about saving the Union, or freeing the slaves, or the glory of Ireland, or any of the things they had been instructed to talk about, as well and good as they might be.

“Come for us,” he had told them finally. “Come for us, if ya want to come. To help us end it, once an' for all, and get us back home. That's the only reason I can tell you honestly why I want you to come.”

It had been worth it, at least, to spend some time with Deirdre and his family. He had felt more fully than ever the weight of the burden he had put upon her, being away. Deirdre with that poor, touched thing, Maddy Boyle, to look after, and all of Ruth's children.

She had already written him by then about Billy Dove, lost out on the field at Cold Harbor, and he had been saddened but not surprised. The brigade had been pinned down in that mess, too, but the colored troops had gotten the worst of it—as they often did. The rebs would not let them surrender, they shot any Negroes they captured in uniform, and fought like the very devils whenever they were up against a colored regiment.

Yet, in the end, their sympathy for what happened to the colored
troops—for what happened to anyone else—was limited. Just as Tom had felt a certain numbness even about Billy, with so many others already dead and gone. The war had gone on for too long, men were too hardened to the killing.

And yet, for whatever whim of God's, he had been one of those who had lived. Coming back to his home for good—

To Deirdre, and the girls, Eliza and Mary and Amanda. The boys, Henry and Andrew. One for the Virgin, and the rest with the high-toned Protestant names she loved. And then all the others—Ruth's poor bairns, to look after as well now. To have a family, in a place such as this—!

It was beyond words. He kept his eyes on the docks of the Desbrosses Street ferry, the crowds surging forward on the quay. The City swelling up around him in its vast cacophony. The church bells tolling now, and a band beginning to play, and the cannon and train whistles booming somewhere up the island.