The Persimmon Tree (16 page)

After eating and drinking another cup of coffee, I felt sufficiently strong with his help to hoist the staysail and then, shaking out the reefs, the mainsail. The warps took another half-hour to haul out of the water and stow. By five o’clock the wind was below twenty knots and the sky clearing, as if the storm had sucked all the moisture from the air.
Madam Butterfly
was sailing well, seeming no worse off than before the storm, though I knew there’d be a host of minor repairs once we had the time to inspect and attend to them.

The little bloke had never done a night watch so I said to him, ‘Mate, think you can take the tiller until eight, until moonrise?’

‘What about jiggery-poo?’ he asked.

‘Unless we hit a whale, it’s all plain sailing from now on.’

‘Whale? You ain’t said nuthin’ ’bout a whale!’

‘It’s okay, by this time of the year they’ve usually migrated well beyond these parts.’

The sun was setting in a blaze of gold when Kevin took the tiller and I took to my bunk. I woke to his touch at dawn. ‘Sorry, boss, I can’t stay awake no more,’ he said, apologising. He’d allowed me to sleep for a miraculous twelve hours.

I made breakfast and coffee for both of us and went on deck to see that he’d lashed the tiller in place, keeping
Madam Butterfly
on course. Something for the better has happened to the little bloke during the storm, I thought to myself. Maybe he’d never make a sailor, but he might yet turn out to be a useful deckhand.

The sun was rising to a beautiful day with moderate seas and a stiff breeze, perfect sailing conditions. I had no way of knowing what our speed had been during the storm, but making an educated guess based on my dead reckoning we’d covered 1200 nautical miles in the thirteen days we’d been at sea. The storm had really pushed us along. This would mean we would be abeam off Exmouth Gulf and about 150 miles, a little over a day’s sailing, from the Australian coastline. Which, in terms of having escaped the Japs, was one thing; but landing on a harsh and uninhabited coast was quite another. We had a lot of sailing yet to do if we hoped to get to a friendly coast and back to people who didn’t want to kill us, although I was fairly confident that we were now beyond the range of land-based Japanese aircraft.

Kevin came on deck about midafternoon carrying the usual brew. It was a glorious afternoon and we sat down to talk, the first opportunity to have a bit of a yak since the advent of the storm.

‘Here, Kev, let me take the bandage off. Let’s see if there’s any storm damage.’

‘It’s the only place that don’t feel broke,’ he said, rubbing the tops of his arms.

‘Well, storms don’t get much worse and you remain alive to tell the tale.’

‘Alive? We still alive? You sure now, Nick?’ Kevin shook his head. ‘I’m a Catholic —’ he started to explain.

‘Yeah, I noticed,’ I interrupted. ‘You seem to have a particular fondness for the Virgin Mary.’

Kevin looked at me sternly. ‘She the Holy Mother! When the shit hit the fan, that where you gotta go, man!’

‘Well, it seemed to work. The first time I went below decks you weren’t in great shape. But I must say, you seem to have survived quite well.’

‘That because I’m dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yeah, when we die we cross this river, it’s called Styx, the River Styx, it’s the way to purgatory. You know what is purgatory, Nick?’

‘Sure, it’s a sort of halfway house where you Catholics earn your way to heaven, sort of,’ I said, not entirely certain my answer would please him.

‘Yeah, somethin’ like that. Anyhow, while we bin in that storm, when I’m shittin’ myself and praying and sobbing and asking Mother Mary to get me outa this place, the Holy Mother, she appear right there in front of me and she say to me, “Sonny boy, you outa here! You dead. You are one dead Irishman!”’ Kevin looked up at me and shrugged. ‘So that official, see? Ain’t nobody gonna contradik the Holy Mother. When she say you dead, you dead… ain’t no resurrection gonna happen, man.’

‘So, what then?’ I asked, staring at the recently dead Kevin.

‘Well, I reckon if I’m dead, then this the boat that’s takin’ me across the river.’

‘The Styx?’

‘Yeah, ain’t no point in worryin’ no more. Ain’t nobody drowned in the river Styx ’cos they dead already.’

‘So, from then on… you were okay?’

‘Well, I got myself some shut-eye ’cos I’m dead but I’m also exhausted from prayin’ and blubbin’ and snottin’ like a kid.’ He glanced up at me and then, not for the first time, explained, ‘I want you to know I ain’t no fuckin’ hero, you hear, Nick?’ He shrugged, continuing, ‘So, then I wake up. Hey, we must be close to the udder side! I think. We ain’t rollin’ and jumpin’ like before. So I come up and I seen you sittin’ there by the tiller. Hey, whaddya know! Nick don’t tell me he is also Catholic. We both dead, I thinks. But, iffen he ain’t, I mean ain’t a Catholic, then we ain’t on the River Styx and I ain’t dead. So, to be sure, I ask if ya wanna cup a java? That when I’m sure, for sure, we ain’t dead no more. They ain’t got no coffee in purgatory.’

‘Welcome back to the land of the living,’ I laughed, while wondering how long concussion lasted and if the hallucinations were back. But I must say, back from the dead a second time, he seemed a different person and happily agreed to change the watch schedule so that I wasn’t always on night watch. We’d do two hours on and two hours off, adopting a normal sailing procedure. I reckoned, with a bit of luck and a following wind, we had about two, maybe three days to go before we sighted land.

The following two days proved to be picture-book sailing, blue skies with only an occasional billowing mass of white cumulus on the horizon. It was during this time that Kevin began to tell me his story. We were sitting on deck having lunch, same old rice, same old fish, but without Kevin’s gravy. Despite the four meals we’d missed in the storm it had finally run out. I should also add that, with the exception of curry, the little bloke had never complained about the monotonous diet and seemed to consume all his meals with evident relish, providing they contained no tinned carrot.

‘I ain’t never again gonna think, “Fish! It gotta be Friday,”’ he said, looking down into his bowl of rice and tinned mackerel.

‘Sorry, mate, it’s not exactly
cordon bleu.
’

‘Whazat? Gordon blur?’ he asked, at once curious. The little bloke may have lacked a bit of polish but he was sharp as a tack and curious, not afraid to ask or to appear ignorant — not a bad start in anybody’s book.

‘
Cordon bleu
, it means “blue ribbon” in French. You know, high-class chow. Supposedly the best there is,’ I explained.

‘Haddock? You tasted it? Tastes like a whore’s pussy. We kids could smell it in the air when we woke up. “Pussy! It’s Friday!” everybody shouts.’

Hoping, while eating my rice and mackerel, to avoid any further analogy describing Friday’s haddock in Kevin’s family, I asked, ‘Come from a strict Catholic family, did you?’

He sniffed. ‘Nah, no family. Not no more. The big strike in ’21, we was kicked out of our place in Canaryville. That’s like being kicked out o’ hell, three floors up, cold water in the winter it freeze in the faucet pipes. Hot water is in the kettle boiled on a coal stove. There ain’t no other place for the working Irish to go on the South Side, them two rooms in Canaryville, it the end of the fuckin’ line. Nobody is working no more, ’cept the niggers.’

All this came in a rush, almost as if he was reciting it. ‘What did your father do?’ I asked.

‘Meatworks on the South Side, from 39th to 47th and from Halsted Avenue to Ashland Avenue, just the one square mile. The smell it was like the sewage plant broke down, only all the time, but people said that smell meant work.’ Kevin chuckled, recalling. ‘They’d say they used everything in the animal except the squeal and they was working on that.

‘Fifty thousand people worked there and they was all treated like dog shit. Irish, Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, Bohemians. The Irish lived east, in Canaryville, east of the stockyards. I gotta tell you I ain’t never heard a canary singing in Canaryville. The Poles lived west, back o’ the yards, they worked on the killing floors. The Lithuanians, north, in Bridgeport. The others, I don’t rightly remember, we never mixed. The niggers, beyond Wentworth Avenue, it was called Bronzeville, they done the dirty work on the killing floors, the Poles done the skinning, cutting and slicing.

‘Me daddy worked in the stockyards, me mother cleaned the guts of the slaughtered animals for sausage skins. With the strike they both got the pink slip.’

‘The strike? What was it over?’ I asked.

‘We, the workers, we was getting thirty cents an hour and they wanted two cents increase. Two lousy cents an hour! Armour & Co, they the bastards, they the biggest — they can slaughter 1200 hogs in an hour. They say to the union, “No rise, no union, no say, go away!” That’s the slogan.’

‘So everyone came out?’

‘Only the whites, not the niggers, they stayed. They bin comin’ up from the South, they the baddest off, but now they bringin’ in more and more to break the strike. Before, everyone kept to themselves, we did our job in the stockyards and they did theirs on the killin’ floor. It was a peaceable arrangement. No problems. But after the niggers blacklegged us and took our jobs there wasn’t nuthin’ we could do; they had us over a barrel. My father, he took no more interest. He vamoosed. California, someone says later.’

‘Leaving you with your mother?’

‘She says she can’t take no more, her nerves. She brings me to Angel Guardian where the Sisters of the Poor who are the handmaidens of Jesus, and the brothers, who are the guards, look after kids that got no family. I’m four years old.’

I did a quick calculation. The little bloke must have been born in late 1917 or early 1918, which made him twenty-four or twenty-five, depending on the date of his birthday.

‘There was over a thousand of us kids there, but not everybody’s an orphan, unnerstan’. I’m legit, some other kids also. We got parents, only they couldn’t look after us because of the strike and what the niggers did to us. My mother she began to visit Dr Bottle.’

‘Dr Bottle? What, for her nerves?’

‘Dr Bottle. Booze. She’s hittin’ the booze.’

‘Ah, I see! Dr Bottle!’ I hadn’t heard the expression before.

‘Sometimes she visits me. She says she’s gonna go straight and she’ll come and get me. Then after I’m six she don’t come no more.’

‘Kevin, where did you hear all this?’ I protested. ‘You were only four when that strike took place.’

The little bloke looked at me, plainly astonished at the stupidity of my question. ‘It’s the history of the Chicago Irish. Every kid in Angel Guardian knows it backwards. The brothers never stopped talkin’ about it. Mr Kirk Bell, him who was the top honcho of Armour & Co, he’s a Protestant, the devil incarnate and the number one bully in the US of A! That’s why they call it “bully” beef! They named it after him.’ Kevin paused, then said, ‘The South Side Irish at the meatworks and what was done to us by Armour & Co and them niggers, according to the brothers and the nuns, that second only to what the Romans and Jews did to Jesus Christ on the cross.’

‘I take it there were no black kids there?’

Kevin laughed. ‘Hey, man, the Irish kids wudda killed ’em. The brothers they all sadists, they wudda flogged ’em to death and took the pleasure of it as a gift from the Lord.’

He was silent for a moment. ‘But I gotta say this. Later at Pontiac, this big black kid, Joe… Joe Popkin, we were buddies. I met him the same day we at Audy Hall, that’s where they hold kids waitin’ to go to juvenile court. We sittin’ there waitin’, waitin’, in those places waitin’ is the name o’ the game. Learnin’ to wait, that the first sentence you get in Juvenile Justice. Joe, he is next to me, he falls asleep when the guard is talkin’ to us, givin’ us our instructions for the court procedure. So the guard hits him across the head. Whack! “Wake up, nigger!” he says.

‘The guard is Irish like me. “Hey, leave him alone, he didn’t do nothing to you!” I say to him when I shoulda known to keep my big Irish mouth shut because it only a nigger he’s hit.

‘So the guard, he gives me a great whack on the side of my head. I go flying off that bench onto the polished floor and when I look up it’s Joe, he takes my hand and pulls me up. That the first time I touched black skin and later Joe says it’s the same for him, only it’s white.

‘From that time Joe and me, we buddies. He’s a big guy and he ain’t scared of nuthin’. In Pontiac, the reformatory upstate where that juvenile judge send us, he always took care o’ me. That where I stopped thinkin’ like it ain’t no coincidence niggers are the colour of shit. It woke me up. They folk like Joe Popkin, they good as us, almost.’

You had to laugh. Racism, black skin, wasn’t only an issue in America. I’d seen my fair share of it in New Guinea and in Australia. But I didn’t want him to jump ahead. ‘Hey, Kev, we’re still in the orphanage, don’t jump ahead,’ I said, eager to hear the story from the beginning.

At sea on a good sailing day, with the sails full, the wind at your back, time is not at a premium. It has always been a tradition that old sea dogs like to take in the breeze on deck and yarn when the weather is fair. We weren’t quite in this category but it was a good time for yakking and an excellent place to be doing it. The Irish in Kevin was all it took to get on a roll. ‘Tell us about, you know, what it was like at Angel Guardian.’