Men of No Property

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Eee, think o’ all the legs ye’d need to fill it,” Vinnie said. He had no trouble dressing, wearing the same rags night and day.

  “Have you no clean things to put on and meet your father decent?” said Dennis.

  “Mind yer own business,” the boy said. He jerked himself up from the slouch and walked off to the hatchway.

  “Aw, for the love o’ God wait up for a man and don’t be so touchy,” Dennis cried, but the boy was gone. He had just managed his own clothes in time to hear Norah calling his name.

  “We’ve made a wee outfit for Vinnie out of a plaid shawl. Will you put it where he’ll find it?”

  “Bless you, Norah Hickey, I will.”

  “I’d no way to measure him save with my eye, so if the fit’s bad will you coax him into it and go between us till it’s right?”

  “I will, but I’m warnin’ you, Norah, there’ll be small thanks but abuse.”

  She sighed. “The times in my life I’ve taken that for my thanks.” She looked up then and laughed. “And glad to get that itself.”

  They were together on deck, the Dunnes, the Hickeys and Dennis Lavery, when the first American boat showed its sails in the dawn. A fishing vessel, it scudded between them and the misted shore, its bell and The Valiant’s ringing a thin change in the vastness. At the bell’s tolling, realization of the peril they had gone through touched the people like a cold wind. A ship’s bell sounded no more on it than the tinkle of a spoon on a wine glass. Everyone sang out hallos to drown the fears of fancy. Those with feet to warm as well as hearts tried the deck for clogging.

  The mist lifted and there was the land as surely as trees need soil to root in. Husbands kissed wives, their own first and others as soon as they could reach them, and on the way the virgins. Children were lifted up that they might see and the captain volunteered to every drinking man aboard a measure of wine for toasting and half a measure to the women.

  Other ships, from schooners to steamers, passed them, the Boston packet, the Charleston packet and the packet to New Orleans; U.S. gunboats, Navy frigates and a great square-rigger bound for Marseille. Soon the waters were studded with every manner of vessel afloat. A tender put aboard men from the New York morning press. They announced themselves from the captain’s bridge, and bade the voyagers welcome. Farrell stood beside them, and introductions passing, got his hand well shaken. There was long talk between them and the sad nodding of heads which might have meant “Alas! poor Ireland,” to them below had they been watching. But land itself, villages, farms and island forts were better watching than sad men.

  There were moments in the day which everyone might recollect: a customs officer waving his hand like a benediction over all the huddle and muddle of immigrant imports without so much as a peek beneath the lid of a basket; the tug steamer hitching onto the tired Valiant, its paddle wheel churning up water like a terrier digging a badger; the coming of land to either side of them, past twin forts as they entered The Narrows, the first ferry boat with waving, bonneted women, and men, slower by far with their hands in welcome; rafts of corded wood, trailing one another like a string of sausages; then Quarantine and land dear and dread at once beneath unsteady feet, examinations to the skin in rooms so disinfected clean as to be foul with the smell of cleanliness, and a white ticket for most which entitled them to carry on with The Valiant; then their first sight of New York City, a great sweep of humped and hewn structure seeming to rise and fall as though it had the movement and not themselves, and slowly defining itself to their searching eyes: the spires of dozens of churches and scarcely a cross topping one of them, great pillared buildings and flat ones looking piled one on another and capped with turrets like crowns; a thousand masts on as many ships and keel rows for more in the making, a great green park and half a circle of slumping trees like so many women letting down their hair at the water’s edge; a raft made of spit and a blister with two white-suited black boys on it dancing and whooping to catch their attention, the first dark-skinned people they had ever seen, and a sign on the raft: STOP AT MRS. O’REILLY’S BOARDING HOUSE: the lettered amongst the passengers read it aloud, and another: MR. O’REILLY WILL MEET YOUR BOAT, and someone muttered, “I wonder which one is O’Reilly.”

  The sounds were as medley as seeing: the hissing of steam from the hoists in every slip they eased by, iron crashing on iron, the grinding of capstans, whistles, and an undertone that might be the clatter of a hundred thousand hoofs and as many wheels over the cobbled and paving-stoned streets; church bells, the clamor of cargo alive from geese to squealing pigs; the scrape of boat against boat in the crush at docking and the great loud curses of the men who poled them; the roar of cascading coal down a slide to the carts and the whinny of horses in fright; a mournful accordion striking a sudden Kerry reel at their coming, and “How can they tell we’re Irish?”

  The immigrants were herded down then for a last clap in the hold while the deck was cleared and the rigging hauled. They listened and measured every groan and turn of The Valiant as she was brought round and crammed into her slip. When they came up it was to a screaming pack of runners who swarmed aboard from the dock, their shirts open at the throat where the force of their lungs might have burst them, their faces streaming sweat and from their mouths the brown spray of tobacco as they shouted; train tickets they were hawking and lodgings for a shilling a night, a free cart for your baggage and that in their hands already; the girls were tapped for employment, but only the pretty and strong, and men tried to lock arms with the free ones while a black-cloaked evangelist shouted, “Beware!”

  Vinnie clung to Dennis who, in the miscellany of faces, could not tell his own if he saw it, much less his brother’s, and clinging to Vinnie was Norah, the child mute in her arms. But Peg winnowed through, a spit full in her mouth for the eye looking sharp on her and her nails set for the hand a fool might lay on her. She took the measure of the star breasted policemen at the quay’s end and chose one to her liking.

  “Are you nailed down there, or can you help a girl?”

  He came near to losing his hat in the river in his haste to salute her.

  “They’re near murderin’ my poor sister and her infant. Are you all savages over here?”

  “No, Miss. Come along and I’ll clear off the leeches.”

  He shouldered his way through hustlers, runners, carters, lookers-on and lookers-after, Peg at his coat tail marveling at the breadth of his back and the map the sweat through his coat made there.

  “Hallo, I’m bringin’ help!” she called, waving wildly.

  But at that moment, Dennis came roaring down the gangway, his trunk on his back. He shouted abuse at an unfortunate carter who was trying to make an honest shilling amongst the rogues. The man was burthened with the whole of Peg’s and Norah’s baggage, and stumbled at bay with it while the runners bated him, trying to coax him into connivery. Dennis made free with his toes and his elbows, driving them off, and with the sharp edges of his trunk as he swung it around like a sledge on a pivot. Norah was in their wake, and Vinnie in hers, sweating less with the weight of his bundle than the heat of his new wool suit. It was a snug fit in the jacket, but the trousers looked in front as though his behind might have the chance there it obviously did not have in the back of them.

  The policeman charged through to them at Peg’s bidding and drove the scoundrels off.

  “Dennis Lavery!”

  “Here!” Dennis shouted. He turned to seek the voice. The face of the man coming to him was as clear to his memory then as the taste of salt to his tongue.

  “A roar like that,” his brother called out as he came, “and I knew another Lavery had landed.”

  Dennis heaved his trunk from his back, flung the coat on it and opened his arms. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.” The one thing coming back to Dennis as he hugged his brother was seeing him at the bottom of a hill outside Dublin when as a child he thought himself lost in a storm at the top of it. His heart beat now as it had then when he had run with all
his might and been caught up and carried home in Kevin’s arms.

  The two men pushed away from each other to measure the change since their last meeting.

  “You’ve grown twice the size of a man, Denny!”

  Kevin looked his ten year start, but in a fine, settled way. “You’re startin’ to gray already!” Dennis exclaimed.

  “I’d of stood still and willin’, if the Lord had let me. How’s the old lady?”

  “Middlin’, middlin’ good.”

  “Norah, are we to stand here and gawk till we’re caught in the dark?” Peg demanded.

  Kevin jerked his head toward them, aware for the first time of their presence. Dennis felt the heart in him sinking. He glimpsed the sullen, tense face of Vinnie.

  “Where do you make inquiries here?” he said to his brother.

  “What did you lose?”

  For the instant, Dennis wished he had lost all of them. “These are friends of mine, Kevin,” he said, “and I’d like you to know them: Miss Norah Hickey, Miss Margaret Hickey. The little one’s Emma.” He laid his hand on Vinnie’s shoulder thinking it might put some starch in the boy. “And this here’s my best friend, Vincent Dunne.”

  The boy squared himself and took the hand Kevin offered him. Kevin bowed to the girls, sweeping his wide-brimmed hat to his waist with the grace of a dancing master.

  “We’ve to find Vinnie’s father,” Dennis said. “He’s meetin’ the boat.”

  “He missed it,” Vinnie said. “I’ll take me oath he missed it. He didn’t want us out in the first place, so why ’ud he meet it?”

  “Vinnie, don’t take on. We’ll find him,” Norah said.

  “I’m not takin’ on,” the boy shouted. “I’m takin’ off.”

  “Vinnie, get hold of yourself. We’ve a bargain,” Dennis said firmly.

  “I’ll get a man with a trumpet,” Kevin said. “Now don’t go from this spot.”

  “Are you all right now, ladies?” the policeman said, having waited the greeting. “I must get back to my post.”

  “Sir,” Norah said, hoisting the child higher on her hip, “can you recommend us a boarding house?—a respectable one for single ladies?”

  The policeman looked down on her and the child, startled. “Single ladies?”

  Peg remembered the pretense on which she had fetched him, to help her sister and her infant. “Aye,” she said, her eyes dancing with mischief. “Unmarried ladies.”

  “No, Miss. You might try the Sisters of Mercy,” he said. His face flooded with color and he retreated in haste.

  Peg laughed aloud.

  “Behave yerself, Peg. “We’re in a fine state and you laughin’.”

  “Shall I stand here and cry? Will it get us out o’ it?”

  “Here, gimme the child,” Dennis said, for Emma had her fist so deep in Norah’s bodice she was in danger of splitting it down the middle. She merely dug in the deeper.

  “Put her down an’ I’ll take her,” Vinnie said. “She’s mine and I’ll take her and yous can go yer own way.”

  “Stop makin’ a fuss,” Dennis said fiercely. “Here, Norah, sit down.” He shoved her and the child down on his trunk.

  “Sisters of Mercy,” Norah said thoughtfully. “Are they a charity over here?”

  “They run a home for fallen women,” Peg snapped.

  “What?” said Norah.

  “Oh for the love o’ God,” Dennis said desperately.

  “Cheerio, matie! No ’ard feelings!” A sailor, his seabag over his shoulder, swung past them, clapping Dennis on the back as he went. It was the one who had delivered him to the captain.

  Dennis shook his fist. “You little wart!” he called after him. “I’d like to blister yous up to the size of a carbuncle!”

  When he turned back, Norah had leaped up from the trunk. Standing beside her was Young Ireland. The coat didn’t fit him, whosever it was, but it was an elegant cut, nonetheless, and no priest ever wore one of its color.

  “Is there any way I can help you?” Farrell asked.

  Dennis drowned out the thanks of the others. “None at all,” he said airily. “We’re waitin’ our carriage.”

  Farrell ignored him. “Vincent, have you found your father?”

  “He’s busy wi’ somit,” Vinnie said, taking his tone from Dennis. “We’re waitin’ him now.”

  “I see.” Farrell bowed slightly to the girls.

  Norah put the child down on the trunk, and when Emma would not release her, she pried the small fingers loose and bade her not to be naughty. Then Norah turned back to Farrell.

  “You were very kind to us all in our trouble, Mr. Farrell,” she said, taking great care with her words. “I hope you have good fortune in America.” She offered her hand to him.

  Dennis stood, his mouth open. She had understood, after all, and sifted her pride through with pity. A deep one, Norah Hickey, for the quiet tongue and the soothing manner.

  Farrell lifted her hand to his lips. “Thank you,” he said. “If there’s any way I can serve you, get word to me through the Irish Directory. God bless you all.”

  He was gone, a boy at his heels carrying a seabag, the loan apparently of The Valiant’s captain. At the end of the dock, he whistled up a hack, and waved back to them from the window as he jogged off. His porter shined up the sixpence.

  “That,” Dennis said, and not without admiration, “is the way every Irishman should tumble onto a foreign shore.”

  Kevin Lavery returned bringing a priest with him instead of a trumpeter. The priest heard the story of Vinnie’s grandmother and then queried him on his father’s name and address, and after that his occupation. His name was all that Vinnie knew. Kevin paid a callboy to go up and down the docks, singing out: “Tom Dunne…Thomas Dunne, yer wanted by The Valiant…the good ship, Valiant, Thomas Dunne…go to The Valiant…”

  The crowd dwindled and the runners, run down, passed a bottle amongst themselves. Dockhands herded the stragglers out of the way of preparations to unload The Valiant of her heavy cargo.

  Dunne, Thomas Dunne, Dennis thought. Done truly. The child was fretful and hungry. So were they all hungry, and the temper was rising in Peg’s eyes. The priest looked solemn. He looked as though the only prayers he ever said were at a wake. “We’ll find him, my boy,” he kept saying. “Pray to God and we shall find him.”

  Kevin took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and opened it to stare at its face a moment. He closed it again, and all as though one had been dangled to him in his cradle, Dennis thought. Kevin replaced the watch and ran his fingers along the gold chain. Then he smiled broadly.

  “Well, how often in a lifetime do you come to America!” he said heartily and rubbed his hands together. “We’ll hire a coach and go home till we’ve found him.” And the tone in which he said it made it seem as though Thomas Dunne had had his chance and lost it.

  Dennis felt himself near to tears. “All of us?” he said, before he could measure the tact in it.

  “All save the priest,” Kevin said in high humor. “You’re invited to a Sunday dinner, Father Shea, Thirty-nine Cherry Street, a long block from the market.”

  This was interesting, Dennis thought, if he had but the time to ponder it. By all the signs, in America the priest came when he was invited.

  Kevin had turned to the girls, and already had Emma in his arms. “I’ve a fair house and a willin’ wife,” he said. “Are you from Dublin?”

  “We are,” Peg said.

  “Then you’ll be welcome as the flowers in May.”

  “Have you childer’, Mister Lavery?” Norah asked.

  He smiled and all the lines of his face converged in the rays of pleasure. “I have,” he said. “Two gallus ones.” There was no doubting the pride intended in the words.

  2

  MARY LAVERY WAS EVERY bit as willing as her husband promised. She stood at the top of the steps, her arms open to Dennis and to all who came with him, making no more of their entrance than to count them off
against the number of plates in the cupboard. She was never a beauty, Dennis decided, but her heart was as big as the bosom heaving over it. Her hair was flaming, heaped on the top of her head like a bank of live coals and her face was but a shade lighter in her excitement. She proclaimed a stew that would stick to their ribs to be waiting on the back of the stove and the water boiling for tea. “We’re not stayin’ long,” Norah said in the doorway.

  “She’s leavin’ before she’s come!” Mary cried and gave Norah a little nudge into the house. “Go in and settle yerself. Is the house rockin’ to you ?”

  “It is after the boat.”

  Mary gave a great laugh. “The day I got off the boat I’d of swore the Lord was jugglin’ the earth in one hand and the sun in the other. Ah, isn’t she sweet, poor thing?” She had discovered Emma. “Sally!” she called out, and then to Emma said coaxingly, “I’ve the one that’ll love you, pet.” To the girls she said, “My Sally is five and there’s nothin’ she wants more in this world than a baby.” She gave Peg a poke with her elbow as Sally came in from the kitchen. “They cost a great deal of money, comin’ all the way from heaven in a bird’s pocket, but I promised I’d buy her one when she grows up.”

  “Hey, Denny, come back down here and give me a hand.”

  Dennis went out the door and down the steps at the side of the building. The Laverys lived over Kevin’s carpentry shop. The whole of Cherry Street seemed a combination of homes and factories. It had the look of running more to manufacturing although the houses serving both had carried an air of respectability into old age. There was an iron fence here and there and the heads on the hitching posts looked to have been chosen in their time one to top the elegance of its neighbor. Dennis noticed a boot shop, a grocery, a grog shop, a candle and soap maker, and across the way a livery stable giving off a strong odor of dung.

  “’Tis a good smell,” Kevin said. “It freshens the stink from the soap maker. We damn near run him out when he opened.”

  “There’s but one smell in my head now,” Dennis said, “the stew Mary promised us. She’s a fine, big woman, Kevin.”