Feast Day of the Cannibals

by Norman Lock

  I decided to accompany Clemens. If the ale house had once served to quench Abraham Lincoln’s thirst, it could mine, as well. As we walked down Lexington, I wondered what I had hoped to accomplish by visiting the general.

  McSorley’s Ale House at 15 East Seventh Street, April 30, 1882

  Clemens wanted to have a drink among the Irish, so that he could count his lucky stars he’d had the good sense to be born with scotch running though his veins.

  “Mostly, my ancestors were Cornish, who drank whatever they could smuggle or was washed up on the beach from a ship they’d wrecked,” he said after wiping beer foam from his shaggy mustache. “Terrible lot of sinners come from Cornwall!”

  “You were hard on the general,” I said brusquely. I had felt a grievance coming out like a rash during the elevated ride to the Lower East Side.

  “You mustn’t mind what I said. God and Grant know what I think of him. The poor man has always had a hard-scrabble life. He was a fine president: He outlawed the Klan, came down on the carpetbaggers, and pushed the Fifteenth Amendment through a congress of jackasses. He fought for freedmen’s rights at a time when one half of the population wanted to lynch the other. And contrary to public opinion, which comes as near the truth about as often as Halley’s Comet does earth, he was not a drunkard. The soldiers loved him, and soldiers won’t follow a drunkard into the Valley of the Shadow of Death—leastwise not when they’re sober.”

  He picked at a tooth with his fingernail and said, “My mouth tastes of smoke and cinders. I’m not sure God meant us to ride in trains two stories above the street, although the view was breathtaking. I could count the number of Chinese cigar rollers and Hebrew rag pickers that can fit in a tiny tenement-house room.”

  He downed his beer, as if to flush the modern world from his system, including James Paige’s diabolical typesetter, which was ruining him. He banged his empty schooner on the bar and called for another.

  “How is life in the customhouse?”

  “Not much of one,” I replied. “I’m moving to San Francisco.”

  “Frisco will be the making of you. Broad, wholesome, and charitable views of human beings cannot be acquired by vegetating in a corner all one’s life,” he declared, fixing an eye on the proceedings behind the bar.

  The landlord, an oily man whose nearly identical height and girth made him tend toward the spherical, had just sliced the foam from a beer glass with a paddle and was setting it proudly before Clemens as if he’d cut the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Having embarked on a third whiskey, I was beginning to grow fond of the curmudgeon, whose obstreperous hair looked like the snakes of Medusa.

  “I’m worried about that throat of his,” said Clemens, showing genuine concern for his friend.

  “Too many cigars.”

  “The trouble with Grant is his heart! You wouldn’t know it to look at him, Shelby, but he’s a sweet old crust. I’ve known him to be downright sentimental when he’s drunk—though he is not a drunkard! Not every man who drinks is a sot, any more than every man who fiddles is Nero or one of them Strauss fellas.”

  Clemens dipped a finger in his beer and, revolving it on the rim of his glass, produced a note, weird and sostenuto, which was once thought to drive women mad. It reminded me of the sound of a fingernail on slate or a tune played on a saw. A dog lying on the sawdust floor began to whine pitiably.

  “That’ll be enough of that, gent, or I’ll stick that glass where you’ll never see it again!” growled a big burly fellow with pig’s bristles on his chin—a stevedore or a carter by the look of him.

  “I’m sorry you have no ear for music, sir.”

  Infuriated, the man leaned across me and grabbed Clemens by the lapel of his white suit.

  Clemens called to the landlord, who was gathering up bottles in his beefy arms, as if they were his children. “Mr. McSorley, I presume.”

  “The name’s Hannigan,” said the man with the bottles.

  “Mr. Shenanigans, is this not the amateur musical society, and haven’t I been invited to entertain with my glass harmonica?”

  “It is not, and you have not!” replied an indignant Hannigan.

  “It seems, then, that I have made a mistake—not the first, nor in all likelihood the last. My apologies, and God’s blessing on you all! Good sir, if you will let go of my lapel, I’ll stand you to a drink of Jameson or the noble Bushmills. I would also like a dish of ale drawn for the dog, whose ears I have unwittingly offended.”

  The man let go. Clemens smoothed the rumpled fabric of his coat.

  “A great pity that I left my Ancient Order of Hibernians pin on my other coat. It would have prevented this misunderstanding between friends, not forgetting man’s best friend, whose slumbers I disturbed.”

  The Irishman thought it better to accept the whiskey and remove himself to the other end of the bar rather than prolong a discussion with a lunatic.

  “One for me and for my friend,” said the imperturbable comedian to the landlord, who by now had returned the bottles to the shelf, above which lolled a painted lady dressed in feathers.

  Roebling, I couldn’t decide whether I ought to be afraid or amused.

  “You baited a man who could have cracked your skull.”

  “It’s a terrible bully I am!” replied Clemens with a comical lilt to a voice that, as a rule, tended southerly in its intonation. “Sitting here among the mackerel snappers, I’m reminded of one of Nast’s lampoons, entitled ‘The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things.’ He’d drawn a soused Paddy lighting a cigar while he sits on a powder keg. Nast’s pen is sharp enough to draw blood from an elephant.”

  I started at a muffled explosion, but it was only a cork being pulled from a bottle.

  The barroom quieted as each man drank toward forgetfulness, insofar as the coins in his pockets allowed.

  “Grant’s broke,” said Clemens. “That son of a bitch Ward cleaned him out.”

  The general had had the misfortune or naïveté to surround himself with crooks. Now in his old age, he’d sunk $100,000 into his son’s brokerage firm. In collusion with the bank, Ferdinand Ward, his son’s partner, had bought a small fortune in stocks, putting up as collateral not only the firm’s assets but also its clients’ securities—identical securities for multiple purchases. Grant had reached the end of the rope with which a man will pull himself out of the quicksand or hang himself.

  “Being an honorable cuss, he’s determined to repay every last debt.”

  “Can his memoirs save him?” I asked, with the humility of someone whose mistrust in a fellow human has proved false.

  “I don’t see any other way for Julia to escape a poverty that wouldn’t even qualify as genteel.”

  “And the general?”

  Clemens shook his head sadly. “Not long for this world. But I’ll be damned if he leaves it from a bed in the poorhouse!”

  Clemens tapped thoughtfully on the bar with his nail. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am: Sam Clemens, Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, or an invention of Charles Dickens—Wilkins Micawber, with a Missouri drawl and a habit of irritating his fellow man.”

  He fell silent, and I noticed how the noise of the world outside on the crowded street and pavement flooded into the taproom, like the roar of an ocean slamming into a stone jetty. I had an intimation of something—a premonition—an inkling of dread. I couldn’t guess its cause, but I felt it all the same.

  “The tide of humanity will drown us all,” I said with the tentativeness of a man who has told a dubious joke. Clemens ignored it, and I felt my face flush in embarrassment. Well, I had been guilty of worse folly. I’d been to the school of humiliation and had learned to eat my words and humble pie. I laughed queerly to give my mouth something to do.

  “Who are you?” asked Clemens, looking askance at me. “Do you even know yourself?”

  I gazed into a mirror hanging between the nude woman, whose throat had been painted in the rosy tones of typhoid fever, and a foxed and fly-specked calendar, where time had s
topped for the Irish on March 5, 1867, the day of the Fenian Rising. I wondered at the stranger whose face I saw reflected there.

  “So you’re lighting out for the territories. Well, I wish you luck.”

  “I’m going to be a newspaperman.”

  “God help us!”

  Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, May 17, 1884

  You’d have thought I was a boy impatient for Saturday afternoon, when, having finished my chores, I could go out into the street and play cowboys and Indians. As I waited for Martin’s foot to mend, I felt happier than I’d been since the panic pulled the rug out from under me. Needless to say, the rug had been hand-knotted in Persia; its replacement was made of rags stitched to old sacking. Each time I visited Martin, I would take a small gift for Ellen: a lace handkerchief; a card of whalebone buttons; an African totem carved from ebony, found in the hold of a Portuguese merchant ship; a Waterman pen bought in a moment of extravagance at a stationer’s on University Place; and a packet of seeds with which to grow forget-me-nots, about which Thoreau had observed that “even flowers must be modest.”

  “I do believe that you are courting me, Mr. Ross!” she said, her pretty eyes glinting with mischief.

  I denied it, my cheeks flaming.

  “Yes, you are!” she teased. “I’m flattered by your attentiveness nearly enough to run away with you. But then who would cook Franklin’s dinner, and, more important, who would type Mr. James’s novels? You may care nothing for a husband’s broken heart, but you mustn’t think to deprive an illustrious novelist of a neatly typed manuscript!”

  I sighed—romantically, I hoped.

  Why shouldn’t I flirt with her? My experience with women may have been slight, but I’m as interested as the next man in what hides beneath a woman’s skirts! Ellen didn’t take me seriously, but neither did she take me for a fool.

  I returned the copy of Redburn to the Mercantile Library for Martin and borrowed Mark Twain’s Roughing It, a book with Bret Harte’s story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” and Ambrose Bierce’s Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California. The temporary invalid feasted on these western tales and loved to recount them, as he had told me Melville’s sea stories, until I grew sick of them. His feelings hurt, he would sulk when I grumbled or dozed in the chair. For the most part, I shared his excitement, and we’d spend hours making lists of “bare necessities,” drawing up itineraries, and talking about our life at the other end of America. Tired and restless, I would go home to bed and count the days until I could leave it and Gansevoort Pier for good. Neither Martin nor I mentioned John Gibbs.

  I had intended to keep our plan a secret but succumbed to an overmastering desire to disclose it not only to Melville, who cheered us, but also to Gibbs, the chief reason for our wish to leave New York. The most inexplicable perversity is that a man will sometimes put his own head into the noose. To my surprise, Gibbs shook my hand, clapped me on the back, and wished me luck. He’s glad to be getting rid of me, I thought, so as not to be constantly reminded of his disgrace by a witness to it.

  “To celebrate your fresh start in California, I want to give you a treat tonight—something to remember me by,” he said, smiling broadly enough to make me wince at the sight of his black gums and rotted teeth. He had all the appurtenances of a stage villain in a melodrama except the waxed mustache.

  I shuddered, and he evidently mistook the cause of my repulsion. Even now, two years later, I wonder how a man of such obvious depravity could have worked me. In prison, I sometimes felt a strange sensation, as though the world were dissolving. Then I would think—I could easily think it now—that you and I, John Gibbs, Martin Finch, Ellen, Franklin, the bridge outside the window are figments! Of Melville’s! He has the brain for such fantasies.

  “I promise, Shelby, the treat I have in mind is nothing like the Slide!” He laughed. “You must have been shocked! But don’t worry; your secret is safe with me.” He winked in that lewd way of his. “What I propose for this evening is a trip to West Houston Street to see the fights.”

  I had no wish to go.

  “You must let me do this!” he said insistently. “To make up for that unfortunate night.” He could sense my reluctance and began to press the matter artfully. “Unless blood sports make you squeamish.”

  I did not want him to think me lacking in manliness, which in our time is measured by the strength of a man’s passion for cock- and dogfights and the gory sight of blood spurting from another man’s battered nose.

  I agreed to accompany him. What else could I have done? I promised myself that it would be the last night I’d ever spend in his company.

  Harry Hill’s Saloon in West Houston Street, the Bowery, May 5, 1882

  Harry Hill is celebrated for his wealth and notorious for the manner of its accumulation. Horse dealer, brawler, gambler, unsavory entrepreneur, and bare-knuckle boxing promoter, he counted among his friends both criminals and politicians, who patronized his saloons. His barroom in the Bowery was a den of iniquity—forgive the worn phrase; it’s the only one in my glossary that is apt. As I’d soon discover, bare-knuckle boxing is a far cry from fisticuffs between gentlemen. It is—Have you ever seen a match, Roebling?

  You’ve missed nothing that can’t be seen when a butcher feeds pig meat into a sausage grinder.

  No sooner had we sat down at a table ringed with the sticky imprints of beer glasses than Gibbs grew excited. The atmosphere of that suffocating room seemed to send him into a rapture. He nosed it, as if a fragrant vintage had been placed before him. Momentarily, he forgot me, and I considered sidling out from the table and getting away. The stink of the West Street holding pens and slaughterhouses would have been preferable to that foul hole. For a second time, I had let myself be brought to a place where men debase themselves. I had put myself into the hands of my mortal enemy, who wanted only to humiliate me. Thus do some men seem bent on self-destruction.

  Harry Hill took the stage, which doubled for a ring, to raucous applause, hoots, and gibes in the colorful vernacular of the Five Points and Sailors Town. He announced the first act in the night’s brutal comedy—an “Irish Stand Down” fought between square-jawed Colin O’Neil and a square-headed Prussian, whose name was lost in a gust of anti-German sentiments.

  You’re not familiar with the term?

  That speaks well of you. An Irish Stand Down, I was informed by my escort through the underworld, sweating beside me in a rabid heat of anticipation, is a contest between two men in which they punch each other, turn by turn again, accepting the blows without moving their feet, which soon become mired in blood and human slurry.

  “I was at the fight when Ben Haight went eight hours in the ring against Bill Murphy before he quit,” said Gibbs, licking his lips. “What a mess they made of each other!”

  Two men entered from the wings, to use a theatrical metaphor, as if words could alter the hideous actuality of the spectacle. They were as unlike the pugilists I had watched at Madison Square Garden as mongrels are from the fancy dogs at the Westminster Kennel Club.

  The men were brutishly built and moved without grace or efficiency. Their prowess lay solely in their ability to stand and absorb blows to the face and abdomen. That they could do so for hours only confirmed the impression one had that they were of an order of being akin to a granite column or a sack of feed. It was difficult for me to watch and nearly impossible to pity them—although I knew poverty had made them fight—any more than I could pity a stone I’d kicked in frustration.

  Gibbs appeared on the verge of unconsciousness, so enthralled was he by the combat. The fighters wore only loincloths in the style of ancient Greek wrestlers, and in the glare of the limelight, their flesh shone. We were sitting close enough to smell the mingled odors of blood and sweat, which Gibbs savored as a gourmand would sweetbreads or a calf’s brain sautéed in black butter. Revolted, I shut my eyes on the jellied faces of the Irishman and the German and, worse, on the shiny faces of the other spectators. I’d s
een them before in theaters where women undressed, as if for human sacrifice, while men leaned expectantly toward the little stage, their countenances transmogrified by lust.

  The Irishman and the German continued to exchange blows, until I could no longer stand the sight of them.

  “I’m feeling sick,” I told Gibbs. “I need air.”

  He turned his face to mine and scowled; at the same time, he grabbed my arm to stay me. He said something, but his words were lost in a din punctuated rhythmically by the unspeakable sound of bare fists on flesh. For a moment, I thought I saw hatred in his smoke-reddened eyes, and I grew afraid. He smiled—because he saw my fear? Who can say? But he relented and let go of my arm and, bringing his lips close to my ear, said, “So you’re squeamish after all.” He patted the back of my hand and nodded toward the door to the street. As I was making my way through the jostling crowd of onlookers, I glanced back at the ring in time to see the German fall.

  Gibbs took my arm and led me down the street until the air revived me. We stopped at a taproom that gave every appearance of being a favorite haunt of stevedores, road menders, and sailors caught on land and waiting to return again to their natural element. Gibbs was clearly in his element, while I felt like a mouse dropped by the tail into a snake pit for the amusement of the public.

  We drank a whiskey each, and then Gibbs urged a glass of absinthe on me. I rarely drink it, not caring for the taste of anise and sweet fennel, but once again, I seemed to be in thrall to strange impulses.

  “Some call it ‘the green fairy,’” he said, licking his spoon after having dissolved a sugar cube in the pale green spirit. “It makes me forget myself.”

  I could guess what there was in him that needed to be forgotten.

  The room tilted to starboard and then, having briefly righted itself, listed in the opposite direction. Melville had walked on decks lurching like this floor—filthy beyond belief—as he sailed toward the cannibal isles. I was pleased with myself and hoped to remember the comparison in the morning so that I could impress him with my cleverness.