Men of No Property (17 page)

The street was cleared of its mortal litter at last. Peg watched an ambulance make its last trip and remarked the sudden stillness on the neighborhood. The water hydrants had been closed, the street barricaded. The lights were coming on again in the elegant houses well fenced and walled behind them. Farrell stood beside her, a torch in his hand. Peg touched her toe to something on the ground: an empty boot.

“Wait there for a one-legged man,” she said, and gave the boot a vicious kick into the gutter. She looked to the sky and then to herself and the tatters her best gown was in. “It’s not as dark as it was, when I can see myself.”

“It was never darker,” Farrell said.

She glanced up into his face and started at the look in his eyes, that same naked hunger she had glimpsed when she stood in shreds before him in the ship’s hold. The blood ran scalding through her veins. She lifted her head and her breasts, thrusting back her shoulders, and parted her lips as though they might tell without words what she knew of him, and what she would, in truth, have him know of her.

It was but an instant of delicate torture.

“Don’t!” he cried out as though in agony.

Shame and contempt and fear flamed into her mind. “You are a priest truly,” she said with spitting sarcasm, and turned from him to find her own direction.

She saw the sputtering torch spin past her. He caught her arms and pulled her back to face him.

“You should wear a mask or blind your eyes,” she cried, trying to wrench free.

He loosed her arms but for a second of time that he might lock his own about her. His breath was upon her face and then his mouth, searching for hers, finding it, sealing it with his desire. His hands sought their way to her body, fiercely strong, shredding her garments as though they were tinsel. He lifted her from the ground, hugging her to his body, and turned her about with him while he measured the distance of the stone wall at their backs and then plunged them along it to the iron gate. It opened at his hand and admitted the way to a sheltered garden. There he laid her down upon the grass, sweeping her legs from beneath her, and in the darkness they bared each to the other and found their searing, torturous pleasure.

The far sounds of the night came to them when their own breathing hushed. What a strange, peaceful thing, Peg thought, spreading her hands in the cold moist grass, to lie upon the earth and with no ceiling but the sky itself. The man sat up, and seeking her face with his hand, he brushed her cheek, her chin so gently. She could see but the shape of him and that broken by the trees against the sky. “We had better go,” he whispered, and then when she was slow to move, for so lovely was this wake of peace, he murmured, “oh, my God, my God.” He began to sob, choking sobs that escaped him the more for his trying to muffle them.

Peg roused herself and put her arm about him. “What is it at all, Stephen?”

But he drew away until he composed himself and it was not until an hour or so afterwards when they had taken coffee in his apartment and he was about to take her home and she asked again what it was that made him weep that he tried to tell her.

He frowned and thought about it, sorting his words carefully, she thought. “When I went down to you that night on
The Valiant,
Margaret, into that bloody melee, I wanted to draw blood myself.” He gathered his fingers into a fist and shook it. “I thought to myself: if I could smash a man now, it would make me Irish, blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh. And then I knew that if I yielded to it I would betray all that I held sacred, yea, Ireland itself. Tonight again I wanted to kill Irishmen, Margaret. Can you understand that much?”

“Ah, that I can, Stephen. ’Tis what makes Irishmen Irish.” He smiled as he would to a child, she thought, who had done its best to understand his meaning and was not able. She tried to shake off the weariness that clouded her mind. “And was tonight with me a betrayal of something sacred, is it that you’re trying to tell me?”

He shook his head, the smile gone from his face. “But it was part of the same lust consuming me. Though I died for it, Margaret, I could not have denied tonight.”

“I wanted you, Stephen, so is the betrayal in it still?” The tears welled into his eyes again but he did not shed them. “Perhaps the deeper for that,” he said, but he opened his arms to her, and though his eyes were troubled, he took her to him and held her in gentle closeness.

They parted at the crowding of dawn upon the shadowed stoop of Mrs. Riordon’s boarding house. The word between them was goodbye, but Peg knew in her heart they would soon find each other again. More than that she did not want to know.

N
ORAH, AWAKENING IN
the night, lay a moment thinking perhaps to hear again the sound that roused her or to recall the dream out of which she had started. Nothing stirred in the building: neither the baby in her crib, nor Emma in the room across; nor was there a sound from the livery stable over which they lived. She put her hand to the pillow beside hers. Dennis had not laid his head upon it that night. She arose and groped her way to the door. There was a light in the kitchen. She followed it on tiptoe and watched Dennis at the table a moment before speaking. Many the time, waking thus or to take the baby to her breast, had she found him over a book or over a paper, his tongue nesting in his cheek, the quill poised in his hand, and the candle so low she would have to chip the tallow away from the handle.

“’Tis late by the candle, Dennis,” she said softly.

“By the glory,” he said, jerking his head up, “I have a marvelous power. Come here to me, love, and let me show you.”

When she reached his side he caught her about the legs and pulled her close, pushed his face into her stomach and burrowed a kiss there.

“Is there anything new in there, do you think?”

“Not yet, please God,” said Norah.

“Look,” Dennis said, indicating the top sheet of his papers, “at what brought you out of your sleep. Read that.”

She leaned over the paper. “I’m not much for readin’ in the middle of the night, Dennis.” Or at any other time for that matter, she thought, exploring the bold strokes of his quill.

“‘I love my wife,’” he read, pointing each word with his forefinger. “ “I love my wife and my darling Kathleen bawn.’ That’s what it says there. That’s what I was writin’—I love my wife.”

“’Tis a pity you wouldn’t be tellin’ it to her at this hour,” said Norah, “and not to the kitchen table.”

“Look at that ‘I’,” said Dennis. “Did you ever see one more elegant save on the priest’s robes?”

“You’ve a beautiful hand,” said Norah, “and I’m awful proud of it.”

“Aye,” said Dennis. “I am myself.” He gathered the papers. “Are you wakened enough to hear a scheme I’ve hatched tonight?”

“Wait’ll I get Kathleen. Maybe she’ll take her feedin’ now.”

“Aye, our first born should be in on it,” Dennis said. He got up and paced the room while he waited. There were plates on the wall and a cupboard of food. A rocker awaited Norah and the child and over its back hung a woolen shawl to which he put his hand in passing that he might feel the soft excellence of it. A scuttle of coal sat by the stove and a box of kindling should their comfort ask it. And a child that wasn’t their own was as well provided as any in the house.

Norah came with the baby, and Dennis held the shawl until they were settled and then wrapped it about his wife’s knees. The infant found her nipple and took nourishment without troubling to open her eyes.

“I envy herself snugglin’ like that,” said Dennis. “Nary a worry of the well runnin’ dry.” He rubbed his hands together, shrugged his shoulders and stretched his neck, a manner he had of preparing himself for a speech whether public or private. “I’ve been in the market now over a year,” he started. “It was never much of a job, policin’ you might say, but I’ve a good and careful wife and I’m not a drinkin’ man…”

Norah nodded and smiled. The child and herself might be his only audience, but he pitched his voice to carry over the neighborhood.

“I’ve a hundred dollars laid by. It isn’t much, but the very island we live on was bought for less. I’m goin’ into business for myself. For ourself. I don’t fancy business. I look to myself instead, if the truth be told, as a comin’ politician, and there’s them agrees with me, bless their powers of observation. But an aspirin’ politician, without a business of his own to recommend him, is like a donkey without a cart. You’re a damn fool if you put your money on him before seein’ him in harness.

“Well, I’m goin’ to put on the harness now. I’ve been observin’ a terrible waste in the market. There’s scraps of beef thrun to the dogs at closin’ time, and there’s people, God help us, ’ull fight the dogs for it. There’s farmers at the end of the day heap cabbages, carrots, potatoes, bags of stuff back into their carts to haul home to the pigs—produce, mind you…” he shook his finger at his audience… “which was handpicked in the mornin’ to be sure of the best. There’s meal dumped in the gutter and waifs scoopin’ it out with their fists and cartin’ it off in their hats. I don’t like to see mortal man grovelin’ for his food like that.”

He paused and Norah nodded, smiling, and made the gesture of applause with her free hand on her knee.

“Now I propose to save the farmers and merchants from total loss,” Dennis recommenced. “I’ll buy what they’ve left at the end of the day, and for more than they’ll get from their pigs for it. Mind you not much more, for I’ve a long association with pigs and know what they can pay—but enough to save men and horses wearyin’ themselves cartin’ the two ways. After closin’ time—and by then I’ll have bought what I’m buyin’—I’ll sort and freshen up my produce and sell it at half the market price and twice my own purchasin’ price. Lavery’s Eight O’clock Market. How do you like it?”

Norah thought for a moment. “At eight o’clock I won’t be over-fond of it and you gone since six in the mornin’.”

Dennis took a chair to her side, straddled it, and caught her hand in his. “Darlin’ one, it won’t be for a lifetime. Maybe if it prospers, until I get my citizen affidavit.”

“In a way you’ll be deprivin’ the poor of their pickin’s,” she said.

“If I didn’t know you put up things in my way to see me jump over them,” Dennis said with an edge, “I’d be in danger now of losin’ my temper. I’ll be puttin’ food at a price they can pay—unless it’s your opinion that poor men prefer to eat from the gutter.”

Norah pulled her breast gently from the mouth of the sleeping child. “Dennis, I wish you wouldn’t try the sting of your tongue on me. I’ll love you whatever you do. I think it’s a grand scheme though I fear you drivin’ yourself too hard.”

Dennis rose from the chair grinning, stretched and flexed the muscles in his arms and back. “I’ve the power no man can drive out of me, myself included. All I needed to bless the venture was your consent.”

“You’ve more than consent, dear man. You’ve my heart’s blessin’.”

And more even than that, she thought, carrying the child to her cradle as he took the candle before them: her heart’s thankfulness, for with such responsibility surely he must give up running with the engines.

Dennis had no trouble persuading the farmers and merchants to his scheme. Kevin built him a shelter and stalls and by way of Godspeed on the venture paid down the first quarter’s rent to the market commissioner’s office. He still had the need of Norah’s help and all the help he could get in establishing himself, because as Mr. Finn cautioned when Dennis took the plan to him for approval, he had need to draw a straight line between the hours he owed the city as market roundsman and the time he devoted to his own interests. So it was arranged Norah should sit watch in the stalls from four until six each day, and Jamie Lavery, Kevin’s son, was hired at a dollar a week after school to gather the day’s remains from the closing merchants. He would do no bargaining, no weighing; Dennis proclaimed his intentions to every man he solicited: he would pay at the rate of a quarter of that day’s price and settle each day’s account as rendered by the merchant himself on the following morning before the market opened. He calculated that for one man who overcharged him another would throw something into the barrel for nothing, and Jamie, fine lad, had a winsome smile.

The plans were glorious and the date set for the opening, September third. A half dozen boys were dispatched with placards in the morning to hawk the streets of the lower wards. “A poor man’s market,” they proclaimed, “the victuals of the rich at a price the poor can afford.” All through the feverish day as Dennis angled his rounds from his own establishment, the pride and the fear and the wonder clamored up and down inside him. His stomach felt as though a parcel of children were bouncing on and off it. He had never known such a sense of family; a clan it was, by the glory. Kevin was touching up here and fortifying there. Mary, his wife, was on hand, her red head like a beacon attracting relations Dennis had no notion he could call his own.

“Shake hands with your cousin Eamon,” Mary stopped him once. A great, dark man was Eamon with a jeweled pin shining from his cravat. “On which side is he my cousin?” Dennis whispered when the man turned away. “On the buttered side,” Mary confided into his ear.

Dennis grinned and skipped off to his watch, observing from a distance that cousin Eamon was supervising the arrangement of something, and making notes on it, by the glory. Oh, the wonder of cooperation a man could stir up by a little gumption!

In mid-afternoon Dennis marked Jamie starting his rounds of the stalls with the cart. The farmers were closing early, as was their custom, to be home for evening chores. One trip and another made Jamie, and Lavery’s Eight O’clock Market was filling with produce. Dennis was turning away that pride might not blind him to his duty when he saw Vinnie Dunne. The lad had come in his work clothes, but he was hanging back at a distance he must have thought kept him from the eyes of the family. He was watching with narrow-eyed longing every chore young Jamie went upon. Had Dennis known this day was coming, he might have kept the lad with him from the beginning. But what was coming? What did he know of the future? Only a fool prospered others on his own dream. There had never been reason to regret putting Vinnie with Finn, and if the lad was becoming something different from what he started—well, there were still less gentlemen in the world than beggars. And here he was in his work-clothes.