Quinn's Book

by William Kennedy

  Will Canaday returned after breakfast, and he, Lyman, and Dirck made ready to leave the mansion. I followed behind, and Joey Ryan behind me.

  “No, no,” Will said to us. “You stay here. Down there is no place for children. Take care of the boy here,” and he pointed to Joey.

  “It would be good for my education to see such a thing,” I said.

  “I want you alive to get an education,” said Will as he and the others climbed into the carriage. Hillegond stood in the doorway as the carriage pulled away, and then called Joey and me inside.

  “Come in where it’s safe,” she called.

  “No,” said Joey, and he broke into a run, following in the wake of the carriage.

  “I’ll get him,” I said, and then I, too, was running, with Hillegond’s screams fading behind me.

  I COULDN’T CATCH JOEY. He was fleet as a wild animal, and more fit than I for such a run, which was two miles or more across open fields, down the gully, and over the footbridge that spanned the Patroon creek, then up the hill on the far side, where I lost sight of him amid distant houses. It was my assumption he would head for Canal Street, where he lived, and it was toward that notorious thoroughfare that I headed.

  Bells welcomed me to the populated city, and I saw women and children walking—toward church, I presumed. People were also moving into a vacant field that began the long slope eastward toward the canal and the river. At the crest of the field I saw forty or more men below me, standing, talking, many with clubs in hand. I sensed what they were about and that they would not be likely to give allegiance to Toddy Ryan.

  I kept walking south and approached Canal Street, with its creek coursing beside it. This was the neighborhood called Gander Bay, named after the sassy fowl the Irish kept in the Foxenkill. It was a place of dread and danger, of woe and truculence. Its dirt pathways, which became deep and pervasive mud when it rained, were narrow, crooked, and violable by the sudden erection of hovels that would force a detour. Many of these hovels looked as if they’d been thrown together in a day, an upthrust of uneven boards with no windows, buttressed by sod or raw earth. Looming up among them was the occasional giant of an ordinary house, half a century old, built when this was open space and the crowd had not yet arrived.

  I’d been in the area before, but not often. It gave no welcome to strangers. In one of the big houses near the creek lived two old brothers, Dinny Reilly, who collected grease from neighbors to make soap (for a certain amount of grease he’d give you a bar of soap), and Johnny Reilly, called Johnny the Cats, who went to jail at cholera time for throwing dead cats into the Foxenkill. Johnny won his name by living with four dozen cats, and the neighborhood rhyme about the men was known to many:

  Pitty-pat, sugar and fat,

  Old Dinny Reilly

  And Johnny the Cats.

  Children were running free, and women were doing their washing in the creek, clothes already drying on tree limbs in Gander Bay’s early sunlight. A man sat astride a backless chair in the doorway of one shanty, arms folded, pipe in teeth, back stiff and straight: prepared for events. Around him lay half a dozen cats and I took him to be Johnny of the rhyme.

  “Good morning, sir,” I said.

  “It’s a good morning if ye think it is,” he said.

  “Do you know where the Ryans live?”

  “There’s Ryans the world over.”

  “A boy. Joey Ryan. His father was Toddy.”

  “Aaah, those Ryans. Ye’d best stay away from that house.”

  “I know Joey. I want to help him.”

  “Then folly your nose that way and ye won’t miss it.”

  My nose led me along a dirt lane, soft from the previous day’s moderate rains, to a turning where I saw a crowd of people, and above them the head and shoulders of a young man in sweater and cap, standing in a wagon, haranguing the crowd in vibrant oratory: “This is what comes of bein’ an Irish workin’man,” and he turned his gaze downward, then up again to the crowd. “A good man . . . alive with the family last night . . . then murdered in front of his children . . . Toddy Ryan gone today . . . who’ll go tomorrow?”

  The silent crowd was with the man, nodding its reverence. Children on the edge moved away when his pause broke their attention. A gray-haired woman in a threadbare shawl pushed forward, her hair tight in a bun, her jaw jutting out with anger.

  “I knew Toddy Ryan,” she said. “He was a good man and he deserves better than you’re givin’ him. Look at him there, shameful.” (We all looked toward the wagon, but I could see nothing because of intervening bodies.) “Bring the man indoors and wake him properly. It’s sacrilegious, this is.”

  “Ah, close your mutt, woman,” said the man in the wagon. “They’ll be after you next, and then after your children.”

  “Where’s this fight you’re talkin’ about?” a man in the crowd asked.

  “We start at the foot of Lumber Street,” came the answer. “There’ll be clubs there for all. We’ll move in a body and meet the divvil himself if he’s a mind to fight us.”

  Satisfied with the answer, the questioner nodded and moved away. Others followed him, leaving an opening that let me see the wagon. Toddy Ryan lay on three boards nailed together, tied down with a rope around his waist so he wouldn’t slide off, the boards slanted to allow us full view of his final image: hands folded on his chest, toes of his shoes too long and turned up, ill-fitting clothes full of stains and holes—a runt of a man who, in addition to being horridly dead, had died in terrible health. His cranial cleft and the caked blood of his wound were the unforgettable focus of the cautionary tableau he offered us: here lies a dead Irishman.

  The speaker resumed his harangue and some in the crowd fell away. But newcomers kept arriving in a steady stream, and I learned that Toddy, since daybreak, had been on tour of all Irish neighborhoods in the city’s north and west ends, a traveling theater piece: drama in the flesh. I asked a woman beside me where the dead man had lived.

  “Over there, isn’t it?” she said, pointing to a board shanty. I went to it and saw the door and wooden latch Alfie Palmer had kicked in. I called Joey’s name but got no answer, then saw the interior was dark and barren, lit only by the light from the open door, and on the floor a broken clay pot and rusty tin cup. Whatever else of life’s things the Ryans once owned had been removed by scavengers. Sunlight shone across the large bloodstain on the dirt floor where Toddy Ryan bled his profuse last.

  I considered what I should do in this place, then stepped fully inside, closed the door, and shut out the day. The room became blackness of a deep order. I breathed the smell of earth and tried to imagine the life of the Ryans in this tiny room, then tried to imagine them living in a ditch with their wagon as a roof. Poor as we Quinns had been (and we had gone weeks without money, our food all charity from relatives), never were we dirt poor, nor ever before had I understood the meaning of that phrase: to live day and night inhaling the odor of raw earth. I felt like a burrowing animal, and thought how the Ryans must have cursed all things and people that had brought them to this condition, and how they must have envied all who lived above it.

  I stepped back into the sunlight and saw that Toddy, the wagon, the recruiter, and his crowd were all gone. I followed the lane and fell in line soon enough behind the wagon, the recruiter now seated and holding the reins but still hailing all gawkers with his spiel: “Hullo and listen to us now . . . look here on the corpse of Toddy Ryan . . . killed for being Irish . . . clubs for all at the foot of Lumber Street . . . we’ll show them who we are . . . we’ll send them to blazes . . .”

  We passed Patroon Street, several dozen of us now in the growing parade with Toddy’s wagon, and we moved north on Broadway in the warming sunlight of the morning. I could see the crowd of men looming ahead of us, twice as large as the group I’d seen on the hill. These were young men, mostly hatless and in shirtsleeves, vibrant in their gestures, anticipating the greater vibrancy of battle. A dozen or two smaller boys were fighting mock
duels with the promised clubs that were being handed out from a wagon. I knew a few of the men: Walter White and Petey Carey from Van Woert Street; Midge McTigue, who had worked at the lumberyard with my father. I guessed that my father would have been with these men had he been alive. I could not find Joey Ryan but I saw Emmett, still unshaven, probably sleepless, and looking gravely upset as he grabbed two men by their shirts. I heard his words: “It’s madness to fight uphill . . . madness to fight at all this way.”

  “Too late for that jabber, Emmett,” one man said, knocking Emmett’s hand from his shirt.

  Emmett pushed through to the head of the crowd to yell to them all, “Don’t do this, men . . . we’ll have a dozen corpses among us before the day is out . . .”

  One hoarse voice called out, “By the Christ, let’s get on with it,” and at that the men, numbering sixty at least, strode forward up Lumber Street, some of them pocketing stones as they went. And then came the rap of the clubs on the cobblestones in steady tattoo: rap, step, rap, step, rap, step, rap—this in march cadence, which the men’s feet found compatible; and they moved to it. Emmett saw me, came to me, grabbed my arm.

  “You’re not in this, boy. I say you’re not.”

  “I was looking for Joey Ryan. He’s out to get Alfie Palmer.”

  “That puny little thing after Alfie?”

  “He wants to cut his head off.”

  Emmett shook his head. “Madness everywhere,” he said. Then he looked at the men moving up the hill. “I’ve got to get with them.”

  “Are you going to fight, Emmett?”

  “Not if I can help it. But maybe I can do some good.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “Then see it, but stay on the sides.”

  I had no animosity toward Alfie Palmer, whom I didn’t know; nor did I feel it my responsibility to champion the cause of Toddy Ryan beyond keeping track of Joey. I walked with Emmett and we caught up with the men as they turned a corner. Spectators joined us: old men, young men, women and children—all on the run from other streets as word of the battle spread; and we moved like a Roman parade, marching the gladiators to the arena. The men kept themselves a tight body as they marched, but when they sighted the enemy waiting two blocks up Colonie Street hill, some behind barricades, their cries went up: “Kill the bastards . . . go now . . . get ’em,” and they broke ranks and with wordless screams ran forward.

  The Ryans, doing themselves no favor running uphill, ran into a hail of stones and paving blocks. They returned them in kind, but the Palmers, galloping downhill with the help of gravity and raised clubs, flung their bodies at the uphillers and felled sixteen into varying states of unconsciousness, losing only half a dozen of their own number in that opening charge. The smack of fists on flesh, the whap of club on skull collided with the curses and whoops of the warriors. Iron bars came into use, though the dominant fashion was the club, either of these tools cumbersome in close combat and some quickly discarded so as to allow fighting with fists and teeth, the battlers rolling and tussling into the proper position to gouge an eye, chew an ear. The battle opened itself and tumbled down new streets and into the pasture that sloped toward Van Woert Street, the growing mob of spectators ringing the fighters, moving with the most vicious, cheering them on to ever grander gouging and bashing.

  There exists in the spectacle of a mass of men in fistic battle a love of punishment and pain, a need to be smashed in the mouth by life or else risk losing sight of what is necessary to survival. In the war I would see much worse, but I’d seen nothing before to equal the violence of this day: the ripped shirts, the bloody faces, the noses and ears bitten half off, the torn and bloody fists with their naked bones, men spitting out teeth, men unable to stand, one man shot but the pistol never found, a dozen men stabbed, two dozen with fractured heads, and some to die of these things and be buried in secret, one of the Palmers stabbed in both arms and never the same after. I saw Emmett remove from the fray the man who did that stabbing, a Ryan, but one not to Emmett’s liking, and so he punched him, but once, on the side of the head, and the man fell like ten pounds of liver. Emmett took the man’s dirk from his hand and rolled him down the hill.

  Women ministered to fallen battlers, blotting their wounds, pulling them to safer turf. I spied a man whose face was the color of a ripe tomato, a scorch in full bloom, and I wondered, is this Alfie Palmer? The raw look of him just might have come from a bath in boiling tea. (How had the Ryans boiled their tea in that closed shack? I saw no chimney, nor any opening for one. Did they live amid smoke?) Such was Palmer’s face (and it was his) that it could not have heretofore eluded me, and I concluded he was a latecomer to the battle. But that face was known, and when it appeared, it magnetically convened the Ryan lust for vengeance, Alfie quickly ringed by more men than could possibly reach him with club or fist. He knocked down two Ryans with his club before he went under: under by choice, I must now think, for what reasons other than guilt, or suicidal madness, could have compelled him to enter this battlefield of hate as a willful target?

  He went down and felt the rain of kicks by Ryan brogans until a group of Palmers moved in for the rescue. But rescue the principal Palmer of the day they could not; for while other Ryans beat the Palmers back, a man all in Albany would come to recognize from this instant forward as Horse Houlihan, a lumber handler of immense size and girth, picked up the inert Alfie and, with great strength and unerring method, broke both his arms and both his legs, cracking each arm over bent knee, stepping on each leg and then snapping it upward, the reverse of its natural flex. The pain of the first break revived Alfie into a scream, but he then lapsed back into his coma and accepted the other fractures without a whimper.

  The battle moved in splintered struggles away from the useless Alfie, the last of his reduction being the gob of spit Horse Houlihan loosed on him. And there he lay, a man of spoiled body and soul, a testament to what? To an incomplete understanding of the forces that had been unleashed through his loss of job and death of son; of even less comprehension now of what he himself had released with his random vengeance on the tragic Toddy.

  Madness was insufficient designation for what had come of it, for what arose among the battlers was not pathology but something more conscious of itself: the final horrific begetting now blossoming in Joey Ryan, who came out of the crowd after the spectators had shifted with the flow. He found himself standing alone, moving slowly forward and then kneeling to perform with stunning malice the final coda of Alfie’s saga: pummeling the near-dead face of his father’s murderer with his slungshot as he shouted “Bastard man, bastard man” over and over, until I pulled him away and was, myself, struck by inadvertence with the weapon, no less painfully for Joey’s lack of intent. My intervention came too late, for the slungshot had created bloody craters on Alfie’s face and permanently blinded his right eye, a total blinding having been Joey’s intention from the moment he espied the inert form.

  I cuffed Joey and flung his weapon away from him, pulled him by the arm off the battlefield in the general direction of the mansion, and we left all Ryans and Palmers behind us. The Ryans, after several retreats, regroupings, and two hours of blood, finally routed the Palmers. Alfie Palmer survived to become the half-blind cripple of Arbor Hill, spent four years in jail after confessing the murder of Toddy Ryan, and lived out his remaining days as drunken beggar and infamous martyr to the unfathomable rhythms of rage.

  Newspapers reported on the battle, calling it a feud between Papists and Americans, between the Irish and the Know-Nothings (who numbered in their political ranks the enraged nativists and assorted hybrid-haters bent on shaping a balance in this republic of equals by expelling the unequals). Will Canaday, in a departure from reasonableness, noted that a number of probable deaths, and an unmeasurable maiming of heads, had been effected in the battle, and he concluded: “It is not enough. Let them keep at it until there are no more of their heads to
be broken.” Will’s view was widely shared, for it had been brought home to us all that the mob at fury’s peak has no politics, no ethnic allegiance, no religion, but is a rabid beast with bloody claws, and must be neutralized.

  On the Monday after the battle I went with Dirck to hear Lyman Fitzgibbon as he mounted a loading platform on the wharf of his foundry and delivered his gospel to the work force at the hour of high noon. He announced he would sustain the cost of repairing Alfie Palmer’s bones but would otherwise leave the fool to his fate; that he would, with great heart, give moral and financial support to the widow and children of Toddy Ryan; that his foremen would hereafter monitor all comparable battles and would note, for purposes of effecting terminal discharge from foundry employ, the name of any worker involved; that he would write his will to encourage his heirs and assigns to do likewise; that he believed in his soul that we are here on this earth to court peaceful ways in the name of the good Christ, and may those who choose otherwise boil forever in the fluid caldrons of hell.

  The silent men, surely not persuaded into pacificity by any such pietisms, began the antcrawl back to their furnaces, boilers, puddles, and moulds to ponder the vagaries of existence. Then, in this peculiar ironbound world under one benevolent God, the making of stoves was resumed, for now and forever, amen.

  Lyman held forth later that evening in the drawing room of the Staats mansion, eulogizing Dirck, about whom, he said, he felt a certain guilt, but also recollecting with heartfelt agony the probable stirrings of Petrus in his grave over Dirck’s book and the furor it generated in this city; for he knew Petrus feared that precisely such, as did, would occur: that Dirck would fall victim to the low pursuit of the word and with mischievous results.