by Lyndsay Faye
“He bein’ a piece of it anyhow, and scores of Nativist rabbits at his back, ready to break what they can, heads or windows. We’re meant to keep order, if possible. Matsell might try palaverin’ them peaceful, but you know Bill Poole.”
“I’m beginning to.”
“Crazy little sod, Bill Poole,” an American copper star muttered. “What does he want to do with the Irish if not get votes out of them, I’d like to know. They’re here now. They’re staying. You’ll as soon deport the cockroaches.”
“Fuck off,” the Irish fellow said.
“No offense meant,” the other returned readily. “I’m marching next to you, aren’t I?”
After crossing Ward Six’s border and continuing east for two and a half blocks, you’ll reach the Five Points. It’s called Paradise Square, of course, as we never did lack for humor—the eye of the pit where the five streets crash together. Neither paradise nor a square, but an infected triangle. There are parts of this city where, during the drier stretches of summer, the boot-deep mud will harden fully, and its smell lessen. Not in Five Points. There are parts where the gin-sotted mabs will go indoors at four or five in the morning, when more than half naked and no longer keen to stand up. Not in Five Points. And in most parts of the island, the people who live there have just barely coin enough to be cruelly snobbish about their neighbors’ race. But in Five Points, where we stood beside Crown’s Grocery with the giant five-story monstrosity of the Old Brewery looming pale and cracked as an old skull across from us, all races live together. Because once a man is poor enough to seek shelter there, no other hell exists for him to sink to.
Bonfires blazed on the damp sewer-ground throughout the plaza. I wanted to think that we stood in recently used coffee grounds, but I knew better. People gathered in clotted packs of three, or of seven, or of twelve, lighting torches at the nearest blaze and seeking out folk of their kind. Knots of Irish mainly, who’d probably been called out. A few blacks, but they stood before their own tenements, looking wary. Clumps of other police too, scores of them.
Right before the Old Brewery stood most of the Bowery Boys. You can see the difference between aggressors and defenders by the way they hold brickbats, and these particular Nativists were lightly draping them along the ground as if using them was going to be an awful flash summer lark. Dressed like simon-cheap versions of Val down to a man. Every shirt collar turned over, every vest screaming with flowers, every dinted hat high brushed silk. And the highest hat of all, atop the cruelest head, belonged to Bill Poole. He’d a cigar between his lips and stood in the exact middle of Cross Street at the triangle’s southern tip, looking lit up like the Fourth of July.
“… and now this festering plague of a religion is allowed to flourish!” he was booming. “No longer hid in low hovels and rotgut cellar groceries. They build a cathedral! And then what do these white savages do, you might ask? They take one of their own kinchin, and they sacrifice him to the Antichrist of Rome!”
Grotesque applause at this from Bowery types, disgusted snarls from the Irish. Blacks waiting to see which of their homes would be burned down to pig-level this time.
“Right. This can’t go on,” said the man to my left, glancing nervously down at his copper star. “Stopping a riot before it happens is one thing, but—”
“If I were you, Bill Poole,” came a voice that cut through bonfire haze like an alarm bell, “I’d go home and sleep it off. And I’m in a pretty fair humor tonight, as it happens. So I’m going to let you go home and sleep it off.”
George Washington Matsell stood before every single one of his eighteen captains and thirty-six assistant captains. Never have I seen a deadlier-looking collection of firemen, street brawlers, Party thugs, and fighting entrepreneurs in my life, and they made Chief Matsell’s hiring practices pretty clear. If you were loyal to the Party or maybe even a good watchman, you could wear a copper star. If you looked like you’ve killed a man with your bare hands and aren’t shy about doing it again, you could be a captain. Valentine was just behind Matsell himself, glancing around him with a cudgel elegantly tilted over one shoulder.
“You all see whose side this standing army, these so-called police, choose to fight on?” screamed Bill Poole. “They’re an affront to Democracy! Patriots bow to no gang of street thugs.”
“Funny you should say that,” drawled Matsell. The quivering points of torchlight surrounding him all seemed to be listening hungrily, holding their breath. “I’ll tell you once again: citizens, disperse! If you don’t know what that means, it means go on the hell home while we find the son of a bitch who hurt that kinchin.”
“And I say don’t disperse,” sneered Bill Poole. “So what of that?”
“People will get hurt. I don’t want that, Poole, though you might. So I’ll put it like this: you’ll get hurt.”
“If you can’t collar a sick Irish lunatic, you think you can bully an American?”
“I think I can arrest a tongue-pad,” Chief Matsell growled resignedly. “Why don’t you do the honors, Captain Wilde?”
“It’s damned queer,” said Valentine, walking easy as you like toward Bill Poole with a pair of iron cuffs and a wicked smile. “And I always thought disperse meant sod off. How are you, Bill?”
“Men!” shouted the chief. “Keep them at bay!”
For several simultaneous eruptions had taken place.
I blinked as I was shoved hard to one side, right into the sagging porch of Crown’s Grocery. The square looked suddenly like one of Hopstill’s calculated lightning displays, leashed fury bursting into the swinging of brickbats from every direction. From behind me, the Ward Eight copper stars surged forward, and I careened toward the Old Brewery and the thick of the trouble thinking, At last.
A fight. And one worth winning too, by God.
Not being used to battling with a cudgel, the first one that came at me might have staved my head in. It meant to. But I ducked, and it hit the mud, spraying filth in all directions. Whirling as best I could in ankle-deep grime, I brought my own leaded stick down on the drunk rabbit’s hand, snapping something or other. He cried out, backing away, toothless without a weapon.
So I found another fight, as good as the first had been.
Brass knuckles flashed from several directions, a single pistol fired just before the fool’s neck met with a brickbat, and I thought, More of this. More. I saw so clearly that night, felt the merest breath of rogues behind me and spun to drive a heavy club into their guts. Some of them ran when once hurt. I didn’t mind. That was flash. I’d no desire to punish anyone, just to win at something, any something, in the lawless den of dogs I’d somehow landed myself in, or so I thought as I caught a nasty-looking thug in the torso, sending him crashing into a public water pump.
We were at open war—windows breaking, men prone in the mire, screams woven into a howling maelstrom of sound. It was a seething, snarling dust-up between American dead rabbits, Irish scoundrels, and the copper stars, who were composed of maybe half and half. That’s important to me. Because we weren’t splitting apart, I saw with a feeling a little bit like watching my brother box, and we weren’t turning on each other. None of us. One saw another endangered and blocked a brickbat with his own club. One saw another fall, and he helped him up. No matter the color of their hair or the cast of their features.
It was a bit of a miracle, truth be told. Or it was to my mind, and the sort I’d stopped expecting from New York.
Then the air turned rottener.
I found myself in the doorway of the Old Brewery, sweating like a draft horse. I’m not sure how I came to be there. It must have been at least thirty minutes later, for the cloud cover was blowing over, and the stars were painfully sharp. Many were still fighting. But some had fallen, or had been arrested and were being forced into wagons.
Whoosh.
It was one of Bill Poole’s henchmen. I recognized his gin-sour teeth and his absolutely apelike hands. It couldn’t have been called his fault, maybe, that the man was
built for destroying.
I stumbled back.
That had been a knife, not a cudgel. And it had sliced a good way down my forearm. The cut felt shallow enough, but at least ten inches long.
My brother appeared on the Brewery threshold, licking his lips like a French tourist. Completely untamable and entirely familiar. He took in the scene.
“Well, if it isn’t Snatch Smith,” he said cordially. Val’s linen was mussed, but otherwise no one seemed yet to have touched him. “Is my brother giving you a beating, then?”
“Not by half,” the villain sneered.
“Then he was planning on it. Eh, Tim?”
Slashed down my arm though I was, I couldn’t find the blood much impeded me. That sad sot was enough distracted by Valentine that when I came after him again, he was off his guard, taking a solid blow under his arm. The knife he’d been gripping flew into the darkness of the Old Brewery.
But I’d missed incapacitating him. Guessing the bigger threat, he’d his huge meaty hands around Val’s throat before either of us knew what was happening. Lucky thing for the pair of us that he’d guessed wrong.
I knocked him cold with the cudgel. And I dropped to the floor myself immediately after, staring up at black rafters, exhausted. Wrecked and bloody and too long sleepless and my head throbbing. An ancient wooden staircase rose above me. I heard a dog snarl, halfhearted yells from outside.
Val stood, half garroted but well and truly alive.
“Snatch isn’t too keen on the hospital,” I heard my brother rasp out as he launched the unconscious man through the door. “A nap in Paradise Square will give him time to think over his choices.”
“I was wrong,” I told Valentine from the ground. “About Bird. It was Silkie Marsh wanted her bundled off to the House of Refuge. Probably would have had her hushed once she arrived. I was wrong to blame you.”
“You get the most goosecap ideas,” Val gasped. “If you want to live a long, plump life, keep your mazzard shut and do what I tell you. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“The riot’s near enough to quashed, and Piest has found something. Some blowsy country hen who’d a secret lover north of town where the kinchin were buried. You and I are for the Tombs, chief’s orders—”
I sat up.
“You bedded Mercy Underhill, didn’t you.”
It wasn’t a question. My brother, who’d checked over his throat and decided it wasn’t any more crushed than it should have been, reached his right hand out to pull me to my feet. I accepted.
Valentine’s lips twitched. “Aye, I’ve tilled her garden. A long while back, though. Why do you ask?”
That wasn’t a question I could get my head around.
“Pretty wench, isn’t she, and she doesn’t know a thing about it either,” he coughed. “There’s the charm, in my book.”
It was the fact that he was right that made me want to scream. “You bedded Mercy,” I said again.
“Well, and haven’t you? You’ve been paper-skulled over her for years, yes? Where’s the fuss? Every free-born American son has occupied Mercy Underhill if she fancies his measure, and you a barman with plentiful chink all that time, enough to show her some sport. Jesus Christ, Timothy, what the devil has gotten into you? A red-blooded woman’s entitled to a little fun. You really mean to say you haven’t bedded her?”
It was too much. I flew at him.
I wanted to see his blood pooling, to hear a good honest yell of pain out of the wretch. First there were feints, a nimble twist on his part. My fist hit his eye nevertheless, with a snap like a firecracker, and I wanted more of that feeling. That he could be taught something. Be dragged down to my level of defenselessness or else hauled up to my sort of sympathy.
Then he’d pinned my right arm behind my back and my face smashed against the crumbling whitewashed wall with his hand holding me by the neck like a new-littered kitten. At least his temple was bleeding. That was satisfying.
“Buggering hell, Timothy! Are you wholesale insane? Why should I matter more than any of the others? You know as well as I do—”
Val stopped because at those words, I’d winced visibly and knocked my own head against the peeling paint, saving him the trouble. I felt his paw on my neck shifting, thoughtful.
“You didn’t know. You found out just now that she’s … available. And you weren’t after a tumble with her,” he added softly. “You were thinking along … churchish lines.”
“For once in your life, please shut your mouth.”
A silence like a yawning chasm.
“Tim, I’m sorry,” he said. It was a strange thing to hear from a man pinning you down by the neck. “I can’t say as I know the feeling exactly, but I’d be caved too.”
If my brother had ever apologized to me before, I couldn’t recollect it. The fingers holding my arm in an oaken grip loosened.
“If I let you go, will you stave my face in?”
“Probably.”
He released me, and I turned to peer at him. A good amount of blood oozed from the cut I’d made by his eye. I still wanted to add to it, but somehow couldn’t when I saw his expression. Valentine looked almost sheepish.
“Well, God knows you’ve cause to stave my face in,” he said with the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “You’ll have another swing at me, gratis, and we’ll go to the Tombs. I’ve done considerable worse to you before ever meeting an Underhill, after all.”
“Becoming a fireman is not worse than bedding the woman whose name I want to change.”
He paused. “You’re one too many for me tonight, Tim, and that’s a fact. What’s wrong with my working as a fire rabbit?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “Don’t play stupid.”
“God damn it, Tim, this is me being stupid. What’s wrong about it?”
“Our parents died in a fire,” I snarled at my brother as he loomed over me, my eager fists balling uselessly at my sides. “You remember, don’t you? And practically the next day you were charging headlong into them.”
Valentine’s green eyes narrowed into fast-turning carriage spokes, thoughts flickering sharply through them. “Maybe that was hard at first. But that’s not why you’ve been angry with me all this spell. Me fighting fires. I’m meant to fight fires.”
“You’re going to make me watch you burn to death,” I spat at him. “What could possibly bother me more, precisely?”
Val started laughing.
It wasn’t his usual regretful chuckle. And neither was it the apologetic full-throated variety. This was a laugh that sent a gash through your belly. Val could laugh at a hanging, I grant, but this made gallows humor seem like smiling at a kite in midair. I felt I was watching someone being gutted, and grew so frightened for a moment that I went and gripped his arms with both my hands. He was wincing as usual, but this time he said the thought aloud.
“It isn’t funny. It isn’t the smallest bit funny, not a wooden jack’s worth.”
“Val,” I said. Then, “Stop, Val.” But he wasn’t listening.
“You’re telling me,” he gasped, “that all this time you’ve been angry—”
“Because the instant our entire family burned to death, you started up charging into every fire you could find. Yes. Val. Valentine.”
It was the only moment I could recall being taller than him, for he’d doubled over with his hands on his knees, tawny hair hanging in his eyes as he laughed like a man who’d long been sentenced to hell.
“Oh, that’s rich. That kittles me. You want to hear something, Timothy, a real gapeseed of a story? Eh? You might as well know what I thought you were angry over. Christ, my lungs.”
“Val,” I said. My own weak voice echoed grossly in my ears, and I thought insanely, You confounded idiot, be more like him.
Val turned his head to look up at me, blood still running freely down his cheek, and he straightened his shoulders. “About that fire. The first one. The one made you learn to tend bar and me to cook supper.”<
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“Yes,” I said.
“I lit that fire,” Valentine said.
He wasn’t in front of me any longer. He was a thousand and a thousand and a thousand miles away. It was a ransomed look. One he’d never before showed me. And since he’d never shown me, I’d never known it was there.
“I was smoking a cigar in the horse barn, instead of mucking out the stalls like I was meant to. I smoked the fucking cigar, Tim, and it lit in the straw, and when I rushed to free the horses, they … I opened the stalls because we needed them, Dad couldn’t farm without the horses, and what sort of … and I was running out of the … I was sixteen years old, Tim, and I thought you saw me. You did see me, tearing open all the stall gates, trying to coax the horses out of them. Running about like hell was at my heels. And it was. All right? You stood in that open doorway and you saw me light that fire. Didn’t you? All this time, I … you were frozen stiff when I turned. And then I didn’t see that it had gotten as far as the kerosene, all that kerosene. By the time I’d dragged you out. We couldn’t. You remember. Not with the buildings attached, and the blaze in the doorway. It was ended. I never did it on purpose.”
When Val stopped talking, he drew his fingers over the back of his neck, looking away. A cry sounded in a near room, followed by a cackle and the merry smashing of glass. I longed to say something. But whatever link there was between my brain and my mouth had been severed, just as sure as the link between my mouth and the distant thump in my chest.
I watched Valentine flick my copper star. “You’re what a star police is meant to look like. I knew it. I was never glad of your being scarred up, but I was glad of the fire downtown if for no other reason. I’ll take myself off, and that way you’ll rest easier. You won’t have to see me anymore. Go meet Matsell and make sure that New York is still standing tomorrow. Good-bye, Tim.”
He walked away with his hands in his pockets. Straight out the wide front door. Every individual piece of me wanted to stop him. Even the parts that were still furious, and even the bits he’d just exploded like a kerosene keg.
But I couldn’t get myself to move quick enough. By the time I’d run into the street with his name on my lips, it was as if Valentine Wilde had been a figment of my imagination.
