And All the Saints

by Michael Walsh

  On the afternoons I didn’t spend with Monk I was usually to be found over at one or the other of the Gopher clubhouses, where despite my conquest of Branagan and my obvious professional ability, I would still often be set to such menial tasks as fetching the beer growlers from the nearby saloons to slake the fearsome thirsts of the gang. There may have been laws against underage drinking back then, but if there were, we didn’t know about them, and no self-respecting barkeep would have paid them any mind, so it was not uncommon in the slightest to see children aged six or seven making the hourly treks from home to pub, passing through the family entrance on their way to fetch Da another beer or, late in the day, to fetch Da himself.

  The gangsters were basically no different than your average Da. They too lay about all afternoon drinking beer, but unlike your Da, who drank to get drunk and forget all about his fat wife and his cruel foreman, the gangsters was busy fortifying themselves for their next job or battle with the cops. I would not care to impute any degree of cowardice to them in this respect, but the fact remains that for more than a few of them a little dutch courage was no bad thing when it came to punching, eye-blackening, jaw-breaking, blackjacking, ear-chawing, arm-shattering, limb-winging, back-stabbing or even the Big Job itself.

  But calculating the profits thereof, that was something about which you needed to be sober as a judge. Since the time of the sainted Whyos there had been a more or less fixed rate for various services, ranging from two dollars for a simple punch-out to a hundred simoleons and up for murder. There was another racket that in my eyes held out even grander possibilities, namely, protection, for sure weren’t the streets of New York overrun with criminals looking to take advantage of the helplessness of a businessman? Hadn’t the Branagan–Mr. Mike dustup proved that? Why let the police have all the action and all the profit when you could take care of your own? The beauty of protection was that everybody needed it, even when they didn’t, and it was during this period that the Gophers got into the taxi-stand protection game, chasing off other drivers with bottles, bricks and pipes, in favor of one or two local companies.

  There was even more money to be made from simple robbing and stealing, and the Gophers were the acknowledged masters of being able to heist your aunt Sally off the back of your cart or out of her railroad car and yourself never the wiser. Said heisting mostly had to do with thieving from the New York Central Railroad, whose yards—and here was our gang’s stroke of geographic genius—lay conveniently across Tenth Avenue, tantalizing in their proximity and lightly defended by a corps of flatfoots who were mostly the bedraggled and drunken Das about whom I spoke above, who couldn’t get no other kind of work. In our poor Kitchen the wealth of nations lay just out of reach for most of the citizenry, locked in rail cars that stood parked and idle within sight of the most miserable widows and orphans. And yet the goods they contained may as well have been in Jerusalem for all the chance the average honest John had to get at them.

  We had the keys to the kingdom, though, and made use of them whenever we could. Our problem, in my opinion, was that we didn’t make use of them enough. As tough as the Gophers was, when sober they most preferred the easy target, like clobbering a peddler wearily pushing his cart up one of our streets, instead of planning how to take the big prizes. That was something I intended to work on, once I had fully learned my trade.

  Monk and I exchanged all manner of confidences that late summer and into the fall and winter. “Own,” he would say as we stood together on the roof of his pet shop on Broome Street, where his roost was. He always called me Own, as if he couldn’t decide between “Owen” and “Owney” and didn’t care to.

  “Own, sufferin’s a terr’ble t’ing.” Monk had a nasty habit of swallowing hard then belching after almost every sentence, the eructation punctuating his sentences like a cymbal crash at a band concert. I think this was because talking was so difficult for him, that it took the cooperation of practically his whole body in order for him to communicate in a nonviolent way. “Tha’s why I’s tries to end da sufferin’ quicklike, and so should you. When you kills a man,” and here he looked at me with those blackpool eyes of his, “make sure ya kills him dead right then and there, for ya don’t wan’ him ta come back ta haunt ya or, worse, kill ya.”

  Monk took it upon himself to drill me in the arts of war, and I quickly became an ambidextrous virtuoso of the Bessie, the pipe and the slungshot. My tactical mistakes with Moore and Branagan were made clear as the dawn over the East River to me, and I resolved not to repeat them. Monk taught me the proper technique of lush-rolling: how you spotted the toper from his distinctive weaving walk, like a sailor without his land legs; how you cased him for backup, in case he was being followed by a police decoy; the words you used to lure him into an alleyway or blind pig; the way you brained him with a pipe or rock; and how you slipped your hand into his pockets in order to relieve him of his purse and other valuables.

  Already, though, I could see other possibilities. The automobile was just beginning to come into popular use, and it seemed to me that when we combined larceny with motion, a whole new way of doing business would suddenly be opened up to us.

  I think it was the gangster who made the motorcar really popular, for very quickly we realized that the auto enabled us to strike at our enemies without much fear of getting struck back, at least right away. Whereas before one had to step up to one’s enemy and confront him, with all the risk that entailed, with the auto you could simply drive on by and shoot him right there in the street. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if statistics showed that half the cars that was bought in the first decade of this century was bought by gangsters.

  All at once, I felt glad to be as young as I was, for as much as I loved Monk, even then I knew that he was a man of the nineteenth century while I was fated to be a man of the twentieth and I intended to take full advantage of it.

  And then one fine day he reached into his pocket and presented me with a splendid .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol that I would henceforth be proud to call me own. “Own,” he says, “I wants ya ta have dis.”

  Now, granted I was just a kid in them days, but kids is people too, and I had certainly been around enough by then to know the difference between a fine piece of armament and a piece of junk and this was most certainly the former.

  “Folla me, kid,” says he, and with that off we go, ambling along a path under the Second Avenue el that looks like all the life that had ever been beneath it had withered up and died. It is true we had a wide variety of els to choose from, for back then there was els practically everywhere you looked: the Gilbert lines on Second and Sixth Avenues, the New York Elevated lines on Third and Ninth, running in various spurs and addenda every which way from there.

  What the el did was smooth the flow of traffic up and down the avenues, more or less, although there was always jams on the el the same way there is today on the streets, but what the el also did was cast the streets into permanent shadow, blighting the ground floors and affording the passengers the added sport of spying on the intimate doings of the folks living on the third floors of every building the el passed by. You don’t hear much about it today, but this afforded the traveling public a good deal of edification and entertainment, and many’s the youngster who first learned the facts of life from the simple act of riding the el.

  If I was to have gone off banging away indiscriminately at any old target on the West Side, the coppers would have had me in the calaboose sure as shooting. But under the Second Avenue el I was in Monk’s territory, as safe as if I was in the Wigwam itself.

  We ended up in the dirty backyard of a tenement on DeLancey Street whose owner, wouldn’t you know it, was an Irishman named O’Donnell from Connemara. The Irish still had a presence on the Lower East Side then, although most of the boat paddies were heading for the West Side. But this O’Donnell had bought the Old Law tenement back when the micks still had some say in those wards, and damn me if he wasn’t gouging them Jews for dear life. He
knew they would pay it too, for what choice did they have? It was pay, work, beggar your neighbor by selling your goods cheaper than he could sell his, and either get up and out or fail and die. Life was simple in our neighborhoods.

  We were firing at beer bottles that had been collecting in the yard, and I had just put down fourteen bottles in a row, seven with each hand, which Monk had set up for me on the top of the backyard fence. “Own,” says Monk to me, “you knows I thinks you got talent.” That was the nicest thing Monk had ever said to me, and I accepted the compliment with the dignity and gravity it warranted. “There ain’t a one of my boys what can shoot like you.”

  I squeezed off a couple more shots, shattering the last of the bottles and scaring the bejesus out of an old lady who’d peeked her head out a back window to see which Gentile was disturbing the peace of the Sabbath. “Thanks, Monk,” says I. “But it ain’t really nothing.”

  Monk belched and farted simultaneously. “Yeah, well,” he says, “just be glad them coppers can’t do the same.”

  “No copper’s ever going to put any lead into me,” I promised him.

  That got a laugh from the expert. “It ain’t the coppers you got to worry about, Own,” he said. “They couldn’t hit ya if there was a dozen of them, got ya surrounded point-blank. No, it’s your fellow gangster what’s dangerous, them guys what have a reason to learn to shoot straight. Watch out fa dem.”

  I said I would. Monk had been around for a lot longer than I had, and I always assumed he knew what he was talking about. Already I trusted my life to Monk and would do anything he asked me.

  Which he was about to do. “Own,” he said, “dis t’ing wit’ Kelly, it ain’t gonna last.”

  I had learned Monkspeak well enough by now to know what he was talking about. Kelly, as I’ve said, was the wop leader of the Five Pointers. Both Monk and Kelly had the protection of Tammany, but latterly the uneasy truce between the gangs that had followed the Battle of Rivington Street and the Peace of the Palm had begun to break down. As a Gopher, I was officially neutral, but my love for Monk was such that if and when the shooting again started, I had already determined to be there, and damn Paul Kelly’s dago hide to hell.

  “What’s up, Monk?” Tasked, toying with my .38. I already loved this gun so much that I would rather sleep with it than with Freda.

  “Big fight comin’, ” said Monk, puffing on his pipe and stroking one of his cats. “Him and me. Inna Bronx.”

  “I want in.” At that point in my life, I still wasn’t quite sure where the Bronx was, but I already knew I didn’t like it. I waited for some response, but he just pulled his bowler down over his eyes and began petting two cats at once, and didn’t say nothing for a while.

  When Monk got like this, I knew better than to interrupt him. Once we were in the New Irving of an evening when a couple of his boys came along with their frails. Generally the boys would tip their hats to their chief and mutter something respectful, but on this occasion one of them got an attack of fool’s courage and said something out of the side of his mouth to his girl about Monk’s toilet that I didn’t quite catch, but Monk sure did. Nobody had quicker ears than Monk when he wanted to.

  He up and felled that bravo, just laid him out there in the saloon, right in front of his girl. First a beer bottle over the head, brought down with such force that pieces of the fella’s scalp went flying, followed closely by a couple of the guy’s choppers when Monk caught him right in the jaw with one brass-knuckled fist; how he had slipped the knucks on I never quite saw, for Monk was quick as lightning when he felt like it. Monk hustled the bum through the doors of the saloon and right straight into the street. And then he was lying in the gutter, looking up at the stars and not seein’ a thing.

  The cats was meowing prettily, so content that they didn’t give a damn about Hilda perched on Monk’s shoulder, nor she them. I had never seen the man sleep, but I would swear before a magistrate that that’s the way he probably lay abed, with a seegar in his mouth, his hands calming his pussies and his birds rooking somewhere between his neck and his shoulders or maybe in his hat; and God knows there was enough food specks on Monk’s shirtwaist to keep a pride of lions well fed for a month.

  “Okay, Own,” he said, his voice issuing from somewhere deep in his belly, though his eyes never opened and his lips never moved. “You can come. But if youse gets in da way, I’ll kill yas.” As much as he loved me, I knew he would too.

  Chapter Seven

  I was never quite sure why Monk adopted me the way he did, us bein’ of two different professions and all, he of the Hebrew and me of the Roman, but some things in life ain’t worth questioning and Monk Eastman most certainly was one of them. If Mr. Mike hadn’ta sent word to him about the precariousness of my situation, if I hadn’ta helped out Mr. Mike in the Branagan department, if Monk had been busy clobberin’ some poor sonofabitch instead of attending to Hilda and six of his cats at the pet shop…if and what if and I’ll be damned if I know.

  One of the reasons I took to Monk so quick was that in many ways he reminded me of my own Da, gone but still very much missed, not only by me and my brother and sister but most especially by my Ma, who dressed all in the black, the way a proper Irish widow should.

  Not that my own Da in any way resembled the great Eastman in face or form. Francis Madden was of the Galway Maddens, the handsomest and bravest of all the Maddens, dark-haired and blue-eyed, like my own good self. No, the way in which the one recalled the other had more to do with the way each man carried himself, surefooted and confident and not about to take no guff off of no one.

  Which are the selfsame qualities that endeared him to Ma, and which made the Madden brood possible. The story, which Ma was wont to tell encouraged merely by a cool evening and a small libation, was that he’d made the journey from Clifden to Galway City in a donkey cart, and then, realizing it was nearing harvest time and he’d not yet found a wife, continued on to the town of Lisdoonvarna in the County of Clare, there to seek a bride among the many young women who flocked to the Burren spa for the selfsame reason, except in reverse.

  When, where and how exactly he first spotted Miss Mary Agnes O’Neill is the stuff of familial myth and legend. Da used to tell me ’twas at a dance, while Ma recollects it somewhat otherwise: that a rude but fine-looking young lad bumped into her in the street and then stared after her thunderstruck as she moved away, straightening herself. The next day she found him standing in the doorway of her father’s cottage, cap in hand, and this time she got a good long gander at him back, and that pretty much was that.

  Back home in Connemara, objections were raised about the O’Neills of Lisdoonvarna, discussions were had about the superiority of civilized Galway folk to Clare poor wretches, etc., whereupon Francis and his old man stepped outside to settle things in the Irish manner. This may have been error on the old man’s part, for Francis was regarded far and wide, the length of Connaught in fact, as the finest young pugilist in the province. And indeed, after a few rounds in the little plot of land sandwiched between the farmhouse and shitehouse, his Da saw the strength of his son’s argument, and so grudgingly relented. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph and all the saints,” said Grandma upon witnessing the results of the discussion. This was the September of 1888.

  And so Francis Madden and Mary O’Neill were married, in Corpus Christi Church in Lisdoonvarna, with the bride all of eighteen years old. Corpus Christi was not a grand church, having been built bereft and bare of any superfluous ornament, in the true Calvinist tradition of Irish Catholicism. Christ Himself glared down from the cross with a particularly pained expression on His face as He regarded the miserable sinners in His flock.

  Folks flocked to the wedding, from all over the baronies of Corcomroe and Burren, from the towns of Lisdoonvarna, Ballyvaughan, Kilfenora, and Ennistymon, from the hamlets of Carrowney Cleary and Cloughaun and Ballinalacken, and by God even some passing tinkers, having observed the festive commotion, tried to stop in and pay their respect
s to the newly wedded couple, but the parishioners of course shooed the dirty gypsies away in the spirit of true Christian charity.

  Immediately following the blessed ministrations, the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Madden and the entire wedding party made their way west for a mile or two to the O’Neill home, which sat astride the Slieve Elva, with a fine prospect of the Cliffs of Moher and the Aran Islands and the Bens of Connemara. On a clear day, or at least a clear ten minutes or so—so quickly did the clouds scoot in from the ocean, like footballs aimed at a hapless goalkeeper’s head—you could practically see the Madden homestead across Galway Bay. Or so the former Mary O’Neill had whispered during their courtship, the wish and the reality being for the Irish more or less the same thing.

  Such music and dancing as then followed can only be imagined, and indeed is still spoken of in those precincts today: “Mna na Eireann,” “Clare’s Dragoons,” “An Cuilfhoinn” and the Sligo song “A Chuaicín Bhinn Dílis” were among the most requested. The pipers let the music ring forth with great vigor, much vim and passable skill. But surely the highlight of the event was provided by Francis and his older brother, Daniel, who, as tenor and baritone, sang the pathetic and beautiful duet “Au fond du Temple Saint,” from Bizet’s opera The Pearl Fishers, which brought tears to everyone’s eyes, so poignant and pathetic was the rendition.