The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

  On the pass he had been ready to die, but not here. He wasn’t ready to die in England full of poison.

  The cramps struck hard, crippling him as he staggered from the enormous eating room.

  In the open courtyard, a dozen men and boys squatted on boards over a pit, relieving themselves. He stepped out of the remains of his trousers and squatted. Stinging liquid gushed out of him until he thought his heart, soul, liver, must have liquefied and been voided. He kept hoping there was nothing left inside, but there was.

  My share of blood, he thought, my share of poison. I am dying like all of them.

  No. He wasn’t. The cramps were already subsiding, and his head was a little clearer. After a few minutes he was able to pull up his trousers, hand over his second ticket to another blue soldier and enter the night asylum where ranks of wooden boxes were organized on the floor with men asleep inside them. He walked up and down and stopped when he finally found an empty box. In orange lamplight he could see others drifting up and down the rows, like men culling through a herd of cattle, or examining old headstones.

  He hated to think of strangers looking at him asleep.

  Too tired to keep standing, he finally stepped into the box and lay down, staring at the ceiling, trying hard to think of nothing, and after a while he slept.

  City of Stone

  THE GUN FIRED and the smoke was seeded with bits of iron that stung his face and eyelids. It fired once more, and this time a slug spinning came at him, its tip sharply pointed, like a fish spear.

  He sat up, violently awake, heart pounding, heat spreading over his legs. An old man coming up the aisle between the pallets was ringing a hand bell with a kind of joy, and men were swarming like ticks from their sleeping boxes.

  “Out and out, you farthings, out and out with you! Come, you poor Michaels, shake the leg!”

  Herded outside, they spilled into the wet, shiny road. It was night still. His breath steamed. Women and girls flowed from another door, and the crowd began sorting into families that started off into the complex darkness until there was no one left except a few white-faced women suckling babies on the asylum steps.

  A plan was needed. Without the spine of a plan he knew he could not withstand the city, it would dissolve him, and he started to walk, aiming for the river, passing pungent lumps of bodies asleep in doorways.

  He would find the steamers disembarking cattle and hire on for a drover. Walk those cattle into the mountains of England. Whistling and calls; driving them easy, as he knew how. He had the voice for cattle. He grasped their moods; he could feel the weather they could feel.

  Work the cattle trade, save. Buy greased hobnail boots, a straw hat — and then, perhaps, a pony. Or a good red mare, a real hunter: a bounder with thick cannon bones, long back, and a spring to her. A sleek pistol tucked in the welt of your saddle. Gun down any marauders wishing to ruin you.

  The world’s a rim, a wheel, enclosing everything. A wheel don’t look back at what is crushed.

  STREETS AND squares of Liverpool were organized, fantastic monsters. Building after building, corners, edges and strict angles — he could never have imagined anything so sharply arranged. The limited sky smoldered and slowly lit, providing some depth to side streets of houses shouldered together. Traffic began to thicken.

  Liverpool men walked briskly, wore boots and canvas aprons. Runners pushed barrows piled with sheepskin, coal, and pig carcasses. Near the river, the smells of brine and tar mixed with the scents of burning coal and horses. Everything moved quickly here — pairs of boys trotted along bearing heavy timbers on their shoulders. Men carrying grapple hooks, swinging buckets of nails.

  You could smell the ferocity on the street.

  WHAT IS Liverpool? A city? A world?

  He stopped underneath a carving of a horse hanging on wires above the door of a beer shop. The smell of smoke and meat leaked out from inside and his mouth was wet with hunger, but he felt uncertain. Coinage was fraught. He wasn’t certain he knew the ritual of exchanges.

  Wary of Liverpool men, massive and unusual. They might pitch him out. Set him a beating.

  However, hard money had some power. He remembered his mother kissing each coin on market day.

  Life burns hot, Fergus.

  Trying to make up his mind, he hopped restlessly from one foot to another, one coin in each fist. The door opened and pack of thick-shouldered men came out, and he caught a tantalizing whiff of the smoky, meaty atmosphere within.

  You could stand outside, bootless and chewing fear like a baby; or take the bold plunge. Offer a coin for a feed and see if they would like it.

  The world, latent; a gun loaded with chance and mistakes.

  The door swung open once more and two enormous men came out, with an odor of hot blood and juice, almost sickening. Ignoring him, they paused to light their pipes, then walked off on their crisp boot heels.

  Honor is held by them in boots.

  Seizing the door, he pulled it open and threw himself inside.

  THE AIR was gray. Liverpool men sat cutting into fuming hunks of meat. The barman, drawing beer, glared at him.

  Fear hummed in his blood but he forced himself to return the man’s stare.

  Luke, make me hard.

  “Away with you Mike! No beggars here!” the barman growled.

  Fergus held up one of his coins.

  “What’s that, Irish brass?”

  He flinched but kept holding up the shilling until the barman reached out and grabbed it, flipped it, caught it — and dropped it in the pocket of his apron.

  “Sit down, you awful savage.”

  He found space on a bench and sat, ashamed of his bare feet among Liverpool men so preoccupied with their fabulous, smoky eating they hardly spoke among themselves. Men glanced at him then went back to their rations — no one seemed to care who he was.

  His beer had a sweet smell, when the barman put it in front of him, like a flower in the sun. The beefsteak had a round of bone in its eye and a rind of charred fat. Cutting the meat into fragments, lifting each delicious piece on the point of his knife, he chewed slowly.

  He worried they were watching him but they weren’t.

  How to ignore the pressure of the rough world?

  By the time he had cleaned his plate, there were only two other customers left in the shop — old brown men lying on benches, hats over their faces, snoring. He chewed the last strand of fat and began to soak bread morsels in juice. The barman behind the bar stood reading a newspaper, eating a dish of cooked eggs.

  Closing his eyes, he saw Luke propped against the storehouse wall, blood leaking on the stones.

  You carry everything inside. Where? In the head. If you could knock it out, would you? If you could scour the brain, would you? Yes. Of course.

  Swallowing the last dregs of the beer, he rose, grabbed the disc of bone, and rushed out into the day’s smashing brightness.

  THE FIRST cattle dealer to whom he applied glared and said, “No, I don’t require no more hands, no.”

  Other dealers on the quays all shook their heads.

  “Don’t need you, Mike.”

  Some of them cracking little whips, impatiently.

  “No.”

  “No!”

  “This herd is only going across the river, Mike.”

  He walked the dockland with senses sharply tuned, like a dog unearthing a badger. Sky over the river, blue as clay. At Clarence Dock a steamer was splashing in, and a runner informed him she was Merrion out of Newry — wherever that was. Her deck jammed with red cattle. He watched deckhands throwing lines and sodden passengers heaving baggage ashore then leaping down onto the quay where runners descended on them like a horde of wasps.

  He approached dealer after dealer, asking for work. Cattle dealers wore sidewhiskers, gaudy pantaloons red-and-white striped, plush waistcoats, and cravats. Their jackets were trimmed with ribbons, and their horse boots shone with grease. They puffed their pipes and looked at him steady.
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br />   No.

  No.

  Not now, Patrick.

  Don’t need you.

  No.

  Dockland stretched forever along the Mersey. Beggars called out in Irish, soft voices crushed under iron-rimmed dray wheels. Each dock held a basin crowded with ships, surrounded by quays and warehouses. Looking up, he watched ship riggers at work in forests of masts, spars, and rigging. The riggers looked like black beetles, working so high.

  Liverpool was a hard place, a stone place; it could grind you.

  Embrace of loneliness shall kill you in the end.

  Walking up the wide road behind the dockland, afraid of being so afraid. Trying to keep your terror compact and hidden.

  Stab the Drum

  AT MIDDAY GUNS CRACKED and bells banged all up and down the river. Hundreds of sailors, dockers, and riggers poured off ships and quays into a warren of alleys behind the dockland, lined with eating houses, roast beef stalls, and beer shops.

  He was standing in the Vauxhall road with eyes closed, feeling the stream of hungry men pour past him, feeling invisible, when he sensed the vibration sliding through the streets like a piece of changing weather. He opened his eyes and saw that horses and carts were being pulled to the side to clear the way for men who were marching up the road following a drum.

  He stood next to a cart horse with his hand on the animal’s warm flank, watching the red-bearded giant who walked at the head of the parade bearing a great drum, followed by rank after rank of men carrying picks and spades sloped at their shoulders.

  “Who are they?” he asked the carter.

  “Scotch navvies, off the railway works. Mr. Brassey’s contract.”

  “Where do they march?”

  “Looking for a randy, I suppose.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A fight.”

  “Fighting who?”

  “You Irish fellows, I should think.”

  The red giant thumped his drum with a pair of tasseled sticks, and the boom of it shook the air; it stirred you, made you feel excited, vulnerable, and weak. The drummer was flanked by six guardsmen carrying pick handles.

  It was moving to see them, a proud, disciplined army such as Luke had never dreamed of. Pipers were playing in the ranks, the wild bleats skirling up and down the Vauxhall.

  As the drummer and guards passed, a figure broke from the crowd of onlookers opposite Fergus and dashed out into the road.

  It was the navvy from Ruth lunging at the drum with a knife in his hand, slashing the taut white skin and ripping it open.

  Suddenly onlookers — men and women — were taking stones from their pockets, pulling out clubs from underneath their jackets, shawls, and cloaks.

  The cart horse whinnied. He stroked the animal’s warm neck, wishing it were possible to live inside your head, and not out in the world, so surprising and ruinous.

  He had lost sight of the navvy — the guardsmen had surrounded him and were flailing their pick handles. The onlookers surging into the road were attacking the Scotchmen.

  People at upper windows along the street were throwing bricks and lumps of coal at the marchers and the stuff was clattering in the road.

  Peering through the flurry of the fight, he caught a glimpse of the navvy crawling down the middle of the road, the red drummer walking alongside and beating him with a pick handle, working at him the way a turf cutter with a spade would patiently work a piece of ground, or a carpenter the jamb of a door, or the boards of a coffin.

  Starting after them, Fergus nearly stepped on a woman shivering on the pavement, blood pouring from her head. Stooping to pick up a spade, he saw the navvy on his hands and knees, wavering while the drummer nudged with his toe, testing to see if he might topple.

  Fergus approached them from behind, gripping the spade in both hands. As the drummer raised the pick handle to deliver a finishing blow, Fergus swung the spade and caught him behind the knees with the edge of the pan. With a scream the red man flopped down onto the paving where he writhed and groaned under the bulk of the torn drum still strapped to his chest.

  Fergus helped the navvy to his feet. The stones were greasy with blood.

  “Give me that whipper,” the navvy insisted, reaching out his hand.

  Fergus picked up the wooden handle, and the navvy snatched it from him and began to beat the drummer.

  You heard the whip and crackle of each blow, but felt neither pity nor anger, only a kind of slow, dense bewilderment as the navvy flailed away, bright blood splashing his face and clothes.

  Suddenly he dropped the pick handle, grabbed Fergus by the arm, and began leading him through the mix of the fighting. No one tried to stop them. The people watching the riot shied from their bloody clothes, and it was easy to cut straight through. Coming out the other side, the way was clear and the navvy let go of his arm and broke into a lopsided run.

  Not knowing what else to do, Fergus started after him.

  Nothing had its fingers on you, running.

  A horse might run until its heart burst.

  CUTTING INTO an alley, they ran past old-clothes barrows and food stalls and through a web of stinking passages. The navvy was quick, despite his wounds, and Fergus had to struggle to keep up, tasting on his tongue the metallic tang of scorched breath.

  A murky passageway brought them out into a courtyard where a cow was tied and children played in muck near a well. A dog with raised hackles lurched from a doorway and flew at them snapping. They threw themselves onto a wall, scrambled over, and dropped into an adjacent court, where a bonfire crackled between raw, unfinished brick houses and two men were roasting a horse’s leg in the flames. They ran down more alleys smelling of tar, filth, and food, and finally out into a hard, wide road lined with iron lampposts, stone buildings, and gleaming sets of white steps.

  The navvy’s neck and shoulders were waxed with blood, his shirt was black with it, and he was beginning to falter.

  Finally he stopped running, bent over, breathing hard, spitting while Liverpool people in magnificent clothes snapped past them, ignoring them.

  “If they catch us, man, they’ll murder us both,” the navvy gasped. “We’ll go for Shea’s. Shea will fix us up.”

  He straightened up. Seizing Fergus’s hand, he shook it vigorously. “Arthur McBride is my name.”

  Fergus gave his own.

  “Never been across before?” Arthur asked.

  “I haven’t.”

  “Raw and green, raw and green — Shea will like you. Come along, then.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shea’s Dragon, where else?”

  Whatever that was.

  Linking arms, Fergus and the navvy began walking down the road.

  As if they belonged there. As if the city were theirs.

  Shea’s Dragon

  “WHY DID YOU STAB the drum, Arthur?”

  “Oh, for the honor. I hate to see those fellows swagger.”

  He could feel the terror in his body soften as they walked arm in arm. It had been there since the night of the farm.

  The rub of their two voices warming him.

  “Aren’t they navvies? Aren’t you?”

  “They are Scotch, and don’t like seeing Irishmen working on the railway contracts. There was a bad fall yesterday, in a cutting on the London-and-Northwestern construction. A few tons came down and buried six of their fellows. They are claiming it’s ignorant Irish getters responsible, saying the contractor must let ’em go, which is all wrong, for we are as skilled as they. There was a randy in a tommy shop night before last, and we heard they attacked one of our camps out by Alybury yesterday, the dogs — burned the shanties and frightened off the women. So we were waiting for them. When I heard the drum, that fucking boomer, why, I reckoned I must go for the thrust, and give our men heart.”

  It was good to have a connection, a companion, and a voice attaching you to the world.

  “Have you done any navvying yourself, Fergus?” Arthur was wipi
ng blood from his neck with a handkerchief.

  “I haven’t.”

  “It’s why you come across, is it? Looking for work?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  He had not been looking for anything, except to get away.

  “Too late for harvest work. Too soon for plowing. Were you looking to be a factory hand? Plenty of Irishmen in Manchester. Have any people on this side?”

  People? Arms and legs, rising in flames.

  You don’t forget anything. That is not how it works.

  The dead cross the water, too. They swim.

  “A navvy can tramp from Aberdeen to Land’s End, railway camp to camp, and always have a feed and a bed. Do you wish to come along with me? What do you say?”

  “All right.” Better than being alone.

  “Boots you’ll need, though.”

  He looked down at his bare feet.

  “Never mind — Shea will fix you up. I was green as you, Fergus, when first I crossed the water.”

  SHEA’S DRAGON was set in a terrace of tall, narrow brick houses in Bold Street, far from the docks. Navvies puffing short clay pipes basked in sunshine on the marble steps. They all seemed to have cudgels or brass-knobbed sticks near at hand.

  Arthur was limping badly. An old man stood up to greet them. “You’re the brave, Arthur!”

  Above white whiskers, the old man’s face was seamed and rough, red as berries.

  Arthur smiled. “Iron Mike. Have you heard?”

  “One of the girls ran back here quick as the devil. Shea thinks they might come to the Dragon looking for a vengeance.”

  Iron Mike glanced at Fergus then started untying Arthur’s bloody neckerchief. Removing his own, he draped it across Arthur’s shoulders.

  “There you are, Arthur. Steady now. Are you badly hurt?”

  Arthur was swaying. “I am feeling a little peculiar, I think.”

  “She’ll want to see you.” The old man nodded at Fergus. “Let’s get Arthur inside.”