The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  “It’s the drink that disturbs them in the first place. Mind what you put in one end, you won’t be so bothered by what comes out the other.”

  His niece sat at the table doing her seamstress work. He drank his tea in silence. Lucky she was to have a tenant in the reeking basement of her Pitt Street hovel. Been there since he was let go from the shoe factory in ’57, and if she showed him kindness in giving him a place to stay, he had never missed the rent, not once in all those years, doing whatever it took to see she was paid, cleaning up saloons, sweeping chimneys, running messages, and all she could do in gratitude was complain about a fire small enough to make a pot of tea. He returned to bed and spent the day.

  The racket made by his niece’s boys was what woke him up, their singing and shouting. They and their friends had come home loaded down with loot: scarves, belts, shoes, even a box full of dishes. His niece told them to get it all out of the house, said it was sinful thievery and she would have none of it under her roof. The boys laughed and started to pass around their spoils to the neighbors who gathered in the kitchen. The boys gave McSweeney some of the porter they had brought with them, and he drank it while listening to their accounts of the day’s events.

  The tea and rest and porter had restored him. Cassidy had stopped by in the morning to see how he was, gave his own extended and embellished account of what had occurred the day before, and suggested a visit to Mike Manning’s.

  Shugrue’s was a far happier, convivial place, and when McSweeney finished his business in the privy and reentered, he found Cassidy entertaining a circle of longshoremen with his account of Monday’s battles. “Mark my words,” Cassidy said, “these days will never be forgotten by the people of New York. A hundred years hence our descendants will celebrate the time the Irish led the resistance to the draft!”

  By the middle of the afternoon, Shugrue’s was filled with reports of the renewed fighting on Second Avenue, the inhabitants of the Gas House District battling the Metropolitans and the Army. “Better to die here,” someone said, “fightin’ for your rights as an American, than down in Virginia, fightin’ for the nigger.” A sizable number of people left with the announced intent to join the battle, although Cassidy whispered to McSweeney that from the look of them he doubted they would make it past the next groggery.

  Cassidy went on talking, and after a while McSweeney stopped listening. His mind went back to the same place and time it always did when the liquor took effect, the time of his youth in the rock-strewn field outside Spiddal, when he lay in the high grass, the time after the potatoes were dug and there were milk and butter and salt to eat them with, the time when the great rainless clouds swept in from the Atlantic, so close and so white that he imagined he could run up a hillside and jump on one, turn it around, and ride all the way to America, the time long ago before his teeth fell out and his bowels went sour, before the years of toil in that factory and the years on the docks, before the weeks of hell in the hold of a coffin ship, his wife dying at sea, before the eviction from the estate of Lord Kirwin and the blight descending on the fields like the judgment of God and the women keening over the rotted praties as though they were the carcasses of dead children.

  Cassidy and McSweeney drank in Shugrue’s all day and into the night, and it wasn’t until word went around that three policemen in mufti had been caught trying to slip into the Brooks Brothers store that the place emptied out. Catherine Street was mobbed. McSweeney felt himself pulled along as the crowd moved south toward Cherry. Some boys ripped up cobblestones from the street and hurled them through the window of a plumber’s shop. They rushed inside and came out with pipes and wrenches, which they handed around. Windows were suddenly shattered up and down the street, and the boys led a charge against Brooks Brothers, prying open the shutters and hammering down the front door.

  McSweeney lost sight of Cassidy. He joined the rush into the store. People tore at one another to get inside. He trailed a washerwoman who used a long hatpin to make a path for herself. Once they got to a half-empty aisle, he set out on his own. He took two shirts, tied the sleeves together, and filled his makeshift sack with whatever he could grab. The numbers inside the store continued to increase. Fistfights broke out. The noise and confusion were deafening. McSweeney kept stumbling in the darkness as he made his way toward the door. The closer he got, the harder it became to make any progress against the tide of people coming in. By some streak of luck he found himself behind the woman with the hatpin and followed her out.

  The pavement was festooned with bolts of cloth, plaids and stripes and solids rolled out like carpets, and a bazaar had sprung up beneath a streetlamp as the looters sought articles of clothing in their size or to their taste. McSweeney put his bundle beneath his arm and hurried up Cherry Street. He hadn’t gone more than a few yards when the cry went up that the Metropolitans were coming. A moment later, a platoon of blue uniforms emerged from the shadows, and people scattered in every direction. McSweeney ran back to Catherine, and another squad of Metropolitans came charging down the street. Shots rang out. Stones and bottles crashed all around. A Metropolitan came straight at McSweeney, the locust stick poised to strike. McSweeney turned and ran. He dodged into a doorway and crept through a pile of broken chairs and tables. It wasn’t until his eyes adjusted to the dark that he realized he was in what was left of Mike Manning’s.

  Beneath the roar of voices from outside, McSweeney thought he heard laughter: a steady, continuous cackle from behind the bar. He crawled toward the sound on his hands and knees. In a small space between the sink and the wall was a body, arms and legs folded like a baby’s in the womb.

  “Be quiet!” McSweeney hissed. “The police is all over the place!”

  The laughter grew louder. McSweeney crawled closer. Mike Manning stared out at him. Fat tears rolled out of the corners of his eyes and down his cheeks. “They’ve taken it all,” he said. “Every shred. The dirty, rotten scum.” He started to laugh again. When he finally stopped, it was quiet. The battle outside had ended. McSweeney put his bundle down and used it as a pillow. In an instant he was asleep.

  McSweeney awoke at dawn. Mike Manning, still tucked in his hiding place, slept, on peacefully. McSweeney took his bundle and slipped out the door. A line of Metropolitans stood guard around Brooks Brothers. McSweeney walked to South Street and followed it north. The docks were deserted. His niece’s place was on Pitt between Broome and Grand, and he decided there would be less chance of encountering any trouble on Broome. He was right. Passed only one saloon that was open. His niece’s boys and their cronies were standing outside. “Come on,” they shouted, “we’re goin’ down to Roosevelt Street and hunt for niggers!”

  He waved them off. He wanted to get home and open the bundle, see what he had. And why be bothered with this nigger stuff? Had little use for them, but always remembered how in his last year at the shoe factory, the owner had hired a nigger to sweep up under the workmen’s lasts and they had all walked off their jobs, all except Dick Starkey, a former organizer for the Industrial Congress. The workmen surrounded Starkey when he left the factory, waved their fists and shouted, “Down with the niggers!” Starkey wasn’t scared. He waited till they were quiet. “Boys,” he said, “you got it half right. It’s ‘Down with Niggerdom,’ not ‘Down with the niggers.’ Down with the system that makes one man a serf and the other a slave, then sets them at each other’s throat. Down with them who put us here to kill one another over who’ll sweep the floor!” They hooted and booed, call Starkey a nigger-lover, but McSweeney stayed and talked to him, told him he liked what he’d heard. A week later the panic of ’57 struck, and soon afterward, the factory closed and the men scattered. Never did find out what happened to Starkey, but his words stayed with McSweeney. Raving against the nigger was one thing, killing him another. Besides, if you took a long look at the state of the world, wasn’t the nigger was the problem.

  He turned onto Pitt and went up to the door of his niece’s place. He noticed that des
pite the early hour, and the absence of crowds on the other streets, there was a large, loud gathering on the corner of Grand. He hesitated a moment, then decided to take a look. He reached Grand as a row of soldiers, having ordered the crowd to disperse, leveled its muskets and opened fire. A ball hit McSweeney in the right lung, shattered two ribs, and came to rest in his spine. He lay in shock. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was a priest in a purple stola kneeling over him. A thumb traced a cross on his forehead. Latin words.

  McSweeney and the other dead lay there all morning. In the early afternoon, a woman came out of a tenement on Grand and threw some old sheets over them. At dusk, five policemen from the Essex Street precinct house came to have a look and reported back that after lying in the sun all day, the bodies were starting to give off a great bloody stench.

  A little after ten that evening, the morgue wagon arrived with two attendants. As the men lifted the corner of a sheet, a single whiff was enough to indicate to them that these dead were beyond making any contribution to the surgical arts, their bodies employed to train young doctors in the use of scalpel and saw, their organs measured, weighed, dissected. The attendants rolled them in heavy canvas wraps. The bodies would be kept for twenty-four hours and, if unclaimed, shipped directly to potter’s field, there to await being weighed in the scales of a more final judgment.

  VIII

  THE GUNBOAT Unadilla plowed north just as Noonan’s carriage arrived at the entrance to Bellevue. Noonan could see the captain standing in the wheelhouse, in a chamber of yellow light, studying the darkness ahead, ignoring the waterfront that he had been ordered to patrol, the Unadilla’s heavy guns a reminder of the measures the government was prepared to take to put down the insurrection. Noonan stayed in his carriage as the ship passed. He remembered reading somewhere how the ancient pagans believed that the souls of the dead were ferried across a river to the netherworld; the Unadilla seemed to him to have been lifted from that story, its black bulk moving off into the night, the light from the wheelhouse like a solitary eye, the pounding of its engines mournful and monotonous.

  A detail of soldiers and police guarded the front of the building along Twenty-sixth Street. The soldiers snapped to attention as Noonan left his carriage. He went into Bellevue by the entrance nearest the river. Above the doorway, chiseled in the stone and limned with gilt, were the letters M O R GU E. Down a small flight of steps was a heavy iron door. He knocked. A center panel slid back, and two eyes looked out. An old man smoking a pipe opened the door and led Noonan into a brightly lit, low-ceilinged room of barren stone, nothing on the walls save a wooden board on which was painted a list entitled “THE RULES OF THE CITY MORGUE.” He had barely had time to read the first (“THE CONSUMPTION OF SPIRITUOUS LIQUORS ON THESE PREMISES IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN”) when the attendant unlocked an inner door and ushered him through a room filled with a dozen open coffins into a smaller chamber in which there were eight marble slabs, corpses laid out identically on each, hands at their sides, loins covered with a white cloth. Gutta-percha tubes suspended from the ceiling dropped a steady trickle of water onto the corpses. The attendant saw Noonan looking at the corpses. “They got twenty-four hours to be identified and claimed. If not, we box ’em and ship ’em to potter’s field,” he said.

  In front of them was a door marked WARDEN. The attendant rapped on it and pushed it open without waiting for an answer. A small man in a white smock sat at a desk eating a plateful of cold, greasy chicken. He stood with a startled look on his face and wiped his hands on his white apron. “We were expecting you, Colonel, but not quite so soon.”

  “Mr. Ahearn is very anxious to have his son’s body. I told him I would see to it.”

  “Of course, but I must impress on you the abused condition of the body.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  The warden took a key ring from his pocket. He escorted Noonan from his office into the corridor. “We have the Major in the latibulum. It’s where we keep the most gruesome cases, out of public viewing, so there’s no gawking by those morbid souls attracted by such spectacles. They come claiming only a wish to identify the dead, but their real intent is the most debased form of sensation. Unfortunately, our city has no shortage of these monsters.”

  They walked down a corridor paved with checkered brick. The warden unlocked an adjoining door and turned up the gas jet. The latibulum contained four stone slabs on which were laid bodies covered with wet sheets.

  “I must remind you, Colonel,” the Warden said, “we know it is the Major solely from the testimony of witnesses. The body itself is unrecognizable. Wasn’t even a shred of clothing left on it.”

  “There were scars on his legs. He was badly wounded at Fredericksburg.”

  “Yes, I’m sure, but as I said, it’s not that there is any question the remains are Major Ahearn’s. It’s simply that, well, the body’s been as horribly mistreated as any I’ve ever seen.” The warden took the corner of the sheet on the slab directly before them. He raised it slightly. “I feel compelled to repeat to you, sir, it is a hideous sight.”

  Noonan nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.

  On Sunday, July 12th, Noonan had left his quarters in Yorkville and traveled to the Provost Marshal’s headquarters, on Leonard Street. The city seemed quiet. But the congregation of St. Andrew’s, where he stopped to hear Mass, stayed its distance from him. A prosperous-looking man in a frock coat approached as he was leaving. “Why, Colonel Noonan,” he said, “I’m surprised to see you here. I thought you’d be off celebrating with the rest of the Orangemen.” He spit and walked away.

  The reports waiting for Noonan at headquarters confirmed what he already knew. Much grumbling in the saloons and alehouses. Threats of retaliation. Talk of resistance. In the afternoon he met with the captains in charge of the district offices. Told them there would be no special guard detailed to any office on Monday. Defend one, you must defend them all. Better to proceed as they had on Saturday, as if this were the normal course of business, as necessary and unstoppable a part of the city’s life as the delivery of the mail or the operation of the courts. Any resistance would be dealt with instance by instance, and the forces at their disposal would be brought to bear in a quick and concentrated matter. At dusk he picked up Major Ahearn at the City Hall Park barracks and drove to the Governors Island ferry. Nightfall brought no relief from the heat that oppressed the city.

  Noonan awoke Monday certain there would be trouble but unsure how bad and widespread it would be. He took the first ferry back to the city and, Ahearn at his side, drove to the St. Nicholas Hotel. He waited for the telegrams to start arriving. He was surprised when the first reports reached him from Jenkins at the Ninth District office, where the initial draft on Saturday had gone off without a hitch. Noonan had presumed that whatever trouble there would be would arise in the lower wards, and even when it became clear something ominous and dangerous was occurring up on Third Avenue, he hesitated to commit the bulk of his small force lest he find that the real disturbance had begun downtown. He kept Ahearn at his side and sent a detachment of thirty men from the Invalid Corps to reinforce Jenkins.

  By eleven o’clock, Noonan had received the police telegrams reporting that the Ninth District office was in flames, mobs in control of the entire area and the men from the Invalid Corps overwhelmed and routed, with several dead or missing. Ahearn asked permission to take the rest of the corps and attack the rioters. Noonan denied it. He dispatched Ahearn to Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street to coordinate possible use of the corps and other troops with the Metropolitans.

  He went down the hallway to General Wool’s office. Wool was dictating telegrams to every military commander in the vicinity of the city, requesting immediate assistance. He paused and stared out the window for some time before he spoke to Noonan. “Goddamn politicians and their draft. The situation is out of control. Mobs are attacking the rifle factory on Second Avenue, that so-called Armory. Owned by the Goddamn mayor and his son-i
n-law. The mayor was here a moment ago to inform me that there are at least a thousand rifles in the place primed and ready for use. Can you believe it? He waits till now to tell me. I should have him horsewhipped!”

  “I’m leaving for Leonard Street to supervise the immediate removal and safeguarding of the records of the district offices,” Noonan said. “I’ve sent Ahearn to Police Headquarters.”

  “Good,” Wool said. “I’ve put General Sanford in command of all available forces. Consider any order from him to have my approval.”

  Noonan rode in a military coach to Leonard Street. In the late afternoon, he paid a visit to Police Headquarters. He set out on foot and passed the corner of Bleecker and Broadway moments after the Metropolitans had charged and dispersed a large crowd on its way downtown. Recognizing Noonan, the inspector in charge berated him for walking unescorted on the streets. “Superintendent Kennedy was set upon this morning near the Ninth District office and beat near to death,” he said. “They’d be more thorough with you. Wouldn’t leave off till they made sure you was dead.” Noonan thanked him for his advice but declined the escort the inspector offered him. He walked the rest of the way to Mulberry.

  Police Headquarters was in turmoil. Wounded men lay in the corridors. Gun barrels poked through the upper windows. But it was far calmer in the Commissioners’ Room on the second floor, where General Harvey Brown, the officer in charge of the federal forts in New York Harbor, stood with Commissioner Acton in front of a wall map of the city. Major Ahearn sat at a desk, writing down Brown’s orders as he barked them out. Ahearn then passed them to a police officer, who carried them off to the telegrapher.

  Brown showed Noonan on the map the various points where the police and troops were engaging the mob, and recounted the success they had had in evacuating several district offices. “It is a highly uncertain situation. Our forces are too thin to put an end to the matter, so we must keep the mobs contained and off balance until Washington sends us reinforcements.”