Paradise Alley (71 page)

Deirdre.
She would know where Ruth had gone, if she and her husband were at least in the City still.
Where had they lived? That skinny little house she was always so proud of?
Somewhere down in the Fourth Ward, near the river. The names coming back to him now with the cumulative trickle of memory. A little street, just off Paradise Alley.

Deirdre would know where his wife was—if she was still there herself. But he could not imagine she wouldn't be, not with that house.

He began to move south, trudging down toward the waterfront. His hand still clenched around the blade in his pocket. Going to get what was his.
Going to cut it loose.

Wednesday
July 15, 1863

It is a kingly thing . . . .
. . . . city . . . .

“THE RUIN”

•
68
•

The third day. Eight in the morning.

The pigs are back on the streets. No doubt they have discerned, with their quick, feral wits, that the worst is over now. They tiptoe about, feasting on all the new mounds of garbage rotting out in the street.

Between them, men stagger from post to pole—knowing no more landmarks, no schedule or habit. Hungover in the wretched heat, the blood and ash still blackening their hands.

I trudge along with the rest of them. All of us stumbling about. Unshaven and unwashed, and the dead among us still unshriven. Still we march on, toward something, as if we deserve it.

We reek.

There is another short, fierce rainstorm. I think at least that it will cleanse us, but the rain is as full of ash as it is of water, drenching us in splotchy, black cinders from the City's own burning.

Troops are pouring into Manhattan at last, from Pennsylvania and upstate. It is reported that the City's own 7th regiment has already disembarked at the Battery, along with the 152nd New York, the 26th Michigan volunteers, the 74th and 65th National Guard. Those troops who were not too badly wounded at Gettysburg have been pressed into emergency makeshift companies.

The mob has not surrendered, though. The rioters still refuse to
believe it is all up, certain to the end that the regulars will not fire on them.

“Not on their own friends an' neighbors,” one of them assures me, repeating the common sentiment.

“Not on their own kin. You wait an' see, they'll come over to us.”

But in fact the troops are taking the City back block by block, brooking no resistance. They fire full volleys into the crowd when it tries to stand against them, rake the house fronts with canister whenever they encounter snipers.

In West Twenty-eight Street, a colonel of the 8th New York at last orders his men to cut down poor old Abraham Franklin, the lynched coachman. The hulking Irish butcher's boy, who had hung Franklin up in the first place, now tries in turn to pull the officer from his horse. The colonel only draws his sword—and runs him through the chest. The butcher boy falls to the ground with a look of real surprise still on his face, twitching a little as the blood bubbles out of his breast. The mob scatters at once, leaving him to die in the street. The soldiers lay Abraham Franklin's body gently on the sidewalk beside him—the colonel's own handkerchief placed over his tortured black face.

At the St. Nicholas Hotel, Wool's brigadier, General Brown, has cleared out most of the lobbyists now. The hotel is an efficient, bustling, military headquarters—the bar telegraph working again.

Commissioner Acton is there, too, come up from Mulberry Street to coordinate the army's attacks with his Metropolitans. He sends off one wire after another to those station houses that are still left standing.

Kill any man with a club . . . . Receive colored people as long as you can. Refuse nobody . . . .

He laughs when he sees me—bedraggled as I must be, not only my suit but my face, as well, covered in soot.

“What have you been up to?” he roars. “Taking up minstrelsy, Herbert? Well, you better get washed up. We are winning the town back for civilization!”

All through the night, he tells me, the police have been sheltering hundreds, perhaps even thousands of fleeing Negroes.

“We even have men out looking for them now, trying to rescue them, poor creatures!”

Over in the 27th Precinct, I witness a trio of hefty Irish roundsmen trying to talk a colored man named Jackson out from under the dock of Pier 4. He had been beaten half to death, trying to make his way to the Brooklyn ferry—managing to escape only by burrowing his way deep into the unspeakably filthy cesspool of discarded fish heads and tin cans, dead cats and oyster shells that wash up under the pier.

The police try to get him to come out, but they cannot convince him that they are not simply the mob in other forms. The ferry passengers join in, trying to persuade him, but Jackson only becomes more wary with every insidious new white voice he hears above him.

“C'mon, now, we mean ya no harm,” a brawny cop named McClusker pleads, dangling by one arm from the wharf planking. “Ya can see that now, can't ye?”

From deep below in his pier cave comes a disembodied voice:

“I can see nothing. I can see nothing but that you're white.”

Finally, in an act of colossal faith—or resignation—Jackson emerges. Cut and bleeding in half a dozen places, his black skin greyed by the harbor mud. His eyes stare off wearily into the distance—the ferry passengers falling back from the very sight of him. The cops bundle him up in a blanket, taking him off to a carriage and then on to New York Hospital.

“Tell me, what made ya finally trust us?” McClusker asks him.

“I just couldn't,” Jackson tells him, and begins to weep long, silent tears. “I just couldn't stay down there no more.”

Near Chambers Street and Oak, just in back of City Hall, I come across an old Mohawk whitewasher—a veteran of the Mexican War who has worked downtown for years. Everyone knows him. He lies dying on the sidewalk now, in the arms of some other workingmen. The mob, it seems, mistook him for a black man—not that they would have cared very much either way.
Extinguishing one old tribe or another.

At the African Methodist Bethel Church, on Thirtieth Street, I ask the colored minister if his people have any hope for the future. He looks at me very directly, his lips pursed and his eyes level and unblinking.

“Yes,” he replies, “in the next world.”

The mob wavers—but incredibly, it is not yet spent, the rioters in many places more determined than ever. They throw up still more
barricades in the streets, wage pitched battles against the police and the army at half a dozen points around Manhattan.

Meanwhile, individual looters are still roaming about, brazenly taking whatever they can. In Second Street I watch a gigantic German workman, striding along with two women's hoop skirts hung over his neck while he sorts through the ruined shops for more. Brooks Brothers—which has so battened on selling shoddy merchandise to our troops—lies sacked and broken on Cherry Street, the sidewalk strewn with fine men's pants and suits, vests and hats.

But I have had enough, at last—looking on all of their depredations now with only half an eye. They can all go to the devil, my City, and the quicker the better. I trudge toward Maddy's house through the sulfuric heat. The fears and phantasms of the night before dissolving in the daylight now. Ashamed of myself, almost too ashamed to look her in the face. Wondering if she is still there at all—

And why should she be? Why should she stay where I have kept her? What could she possibly need me for anymore?

Still, I must make sure that she is all right. I must see if she will come back with me—if she can stand to be with me at all, after I have let her down. We must reach some new arrangement, if that is possible.

I am nearly to the Shambles when I see the men. Some forty or fifty of them, at least. Moving swiftly, loping off the block with the look of furtive dogs who have just done something they know they should not have.

Maddy—

I begin to walk faster—then to run—grabbing for the gun. Knowing, as the bottom drops out of my stomach, that there is no more time.
The war is here.

•
69
•

They arrived just before dawn and mustered in Stuyvesant Square, in the pretty little park across from a plain redbrick Quaker meeting house. It had taken the flatboats all night to pole them across to Desbrosses Street, and when they were finally all assembled, they were served a breakfast that was too rotten to eat, even for men used to field rations—wormy beef, and soggy bread and cheese that was covered with fuzzy blue splotches of mold. Soon after that a thunderstorm came up, sudden and fierce, soaking them to the bone before it danced on out over the East River and doing nothing more to improve their disposition.

At last the order came to move out, into the Second Avenue. Their command was made up of the wounded men from half a dozen different regiments, but they were all veterans and they marched with an easy professionalism. The sun was already out again, water steaming off the street before them. They stepped over the gaping holes in the street where the paving stones had been torn out, staring at the burned-out shells of houses, the clothing and broken furniture strewn along the sidewalks. The City so much the same as they remembered but so altered, like a familiar place revisited in a bad dream.

What the hell is going on?
Tom wondered, chafing to get back to Paradise Alley already.
So close to home now.

They got some idea of what they were up against when they
reached Nineteenth Street, and Duryea's Zouaves came streaming back past them. They had been sent out as the advance guard, with their howitzers, but now they came limping back, looking shamefaced, and glad to be away with their lives.

Like Sickles's men, tumbling back from the wheat field—

“It was a trap! They led us on, then shot us to pieces from the rooftops,” one of them told Snatchem when he stopped him.
The old gang trick—one that any police sergeant would have seen through.

“There was thousands of 'em! They got the howitzers. I think they kilt the officers, too—”

The man broke away and ran on down the street with the rest of the Zouaves, their baggy red pants and Turkish harem jackets blackened with soot and powder now.
How fine they had looked in those uniforms, marching off to the war two years ago—

They opened their ranks to let the defeated men pass—Tom and the others from the 69th still unmoved. They had seen plenty of defeat, including their own, and they knew enough by now not to be spooked by it. Instead, it only added to their slowly kindled anger.
To be run by a mob, in their own city. They would have to see about that.
They swung on up around the corner, over to the First Avenue—and there it was.

The Zouaves were right,
Tom saw at once. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of men and women in the street. Swarming over the broken, looted homes and stores like so many cockroaches on a chunk of old cheese—some of them still pummeling the helpless wounded men the Zouaves had left behind. On the corner, too, they had put up their shingle—three black bodies, hanging naked and mutilated from a single lamppost, like a brace of pheasants. Two that had been men and one a woman, their bodies still smoking, dripping human fat that hissed like the rain when it hit the street.

“Jesus. Jesus God.”

“The sons a bitches,” Snatchem said softly.

He could hear the other men—battle veterans, all—swearing softly, up and down the line. But when the crowd took notice of them, they began to cheer, recognizing how many of them were from New York.

“C'mon, Irishmen! There's not a thing that can stop us, if you're with us!”

“We'll take the whole City!”

“Come, friends, come to us!”

Yet behind the cheering rioters Tom could see others, running back and forth, trying to find anything they could fire from the howitzers they had wrested from the Zouaves. Stuffing the mouths of the wide, squat guns with nails and rocks, chunks of metal and glass, trying to find something they could employ for a fuse.

“
Friends, my arse,
” Feeley muttered.

The drums began to beat, and Tom's company moved down the street, double-time. The artillerymen coolly rolling up a battery of rifled cannon along their flanks. The colonel walking his horse on ahead of them, waving his sword in a slow circle over his head.

The looters dropped what they were doing now. Some of them fled behind a flimsy barricade they had erected across the First Avenue—while others still chanted at them hopefully, even holding out their arms.

“Join us! Join us!”

“Join your friends and neighbors!”

But there were already scattered shots and bricks, from the rooftops, spattering along the pavement by their feet. The soldiers ignored it—marching up to the barricade—nothing more than a lamppost, and a pile of broken chairs and beds, and wagon beds.
Nothing that would stand against veteran troops.

“Join us! Join us!”

They halted and leveled their rifles, ten yards from the grinning, cheering faces. So like the ones Tom had seen his whole life in the ward—some of them the very same faces. Tanned and weathered from so many days of working under the sun, streaked now with soot and ash, from their exertions this morning. Or the night before, or the day before that—whenever it was that they had decided to hang their fellow human beings up from a lamppost and light them on fire.

Still grinning now—still thinking the troops were coming over to them. Not understanding, even now, that this was not another game. Not understanding, for all they knew of the hardness of life, what a war was. Whooping and laughing as they had the day they had first seen them off, with their grand parade to the docks—

“Singin', we're the boys that fear no noise—”

Their first volley swept away the barricade as if it was so much litter. The second one cleared the street, sending the mob screaming, shrieking and crying, down the block, fleeing into any house or storefront they could find. The pavement covered at once with the dead, and the moaning, bleeding wounded.
Just like every field they had seen for the last two years.
The rioters howling and cursing as they scattered before them.

“Damn ye! Damn ye! To do this to yer own people!”

“You're no better than the police!”

Tom spotted one bunch of hard-looking bruisers and went to run them. Chasing them up the stairs of a brownstone and into the house, George and Feeley and Larkins right behind him. Even with his bad leg, he pursued them through the smashed house, the broken crockery and glass and furniture crunching under his feet.

They chased them right up on the roof, where the men had suddenly turned and thrown up their hands, trying to surrender. Tom saw that at least two of them were men he knew, from the Black Joke—men who had manned the brakes just down the line from him for years. They recognized him, too, and the rest of them. He could see it in their faces—their eyes widening, a look of relief passing over them, as they saw that they were saved.

Instead they kept right on coming, their bayonets fixed. The men they had cornered had kept their hands up, unable to believe they would actually run through their old mates. Only at the very last did they understand that they were not going to stop, and jumped off the roof—landing hard in the street, three stories below, breaking legs and arms and screaming in pain.

Tom and his men watched them from above for a moment—then they ran back down, their bayonets still out, to root out the rest of the mob.

They did not know what a war was.

When he had gone back to the regiment, after his long convalescence, Tom had been certain he was going to die. Convinced that this was God's judgment upon him for what he had done to Johnny Dolan, for selling another man into servitude, only grateful that he had been able to reconcile with his wife.

All through the campaign, as they churned through the dusty
turnpikes of Maryland and Pennsylvania, he had known he would die in the next fight. It was a feeling the more veteran soldiers talked about, and though he had silently scoffed at such premonitions in the past—having seen plenty of those same veterans who had thought they were doomed standing in front of their tents the day after the battle, their faces filled with wonder—he had had no doubt that he himself was going to die.

And what a fight it had been, as bad as Fredericksburg, and two days longer.

He had nearly been killed on the second day. The regiment had been cut off in a peach orchard, thanks to the usual foolishness of their commanders, and they had had to cut their way out. It had been a desperate, running fight, through the lined trees of the orchard, the air around them fragrant with the smell of dropped peaches. The gaunt, screaming faces of the rebs all around them.

John J. Sullivan had fallen there, shot point-blank by some lieutenant from Mississippi when his head was turned. He never even saw the man, though Snatchem had gutted him immediately, plunging his bayonet up through the officer's kidneys. Tom looked down at him as he ran past—some immaculately tailored college boy, looking as if he had just left his cadet class, the life shaking out of him now amid the fallen peaches.

Before they could make it back to the line, Feeley had taken a ball in his collarbone, too—another reb trying to stick him where he lay. Tom was just able to knock the reb down with his rifle butt, then he and George had pulled him back toward their own guns along Cemetery Ridge. Feeley cursing and screaming with each jolt of his shoulder, the rest of them shrieking like madmen as they ran straight toward the gun muzzles, the cannoneers already setting the fuses—

“Don't you fire! Don't you dare fire yet, you sponging sons a bitches!”

Then they were past, back in their own lines. The guns firing almost immediately, into both the rebs and the still-retreating men from their own brigade. The soldiers from both sides, torn apart in an instant. The guns firing again and again, until at last the charge was broken, the rebs falling back through the bloody fields and the shredded orchard trees.

Later, when the regiment was pulled out of the line, they had helped Feeley off to the field hospital. It was the most gruesome sight
Tom had ever seen, the cutting floor at The Place of Blood not excluded. The surgeons sawing away through arms and legs with terrifying speed and recklessness. Tearing into guts and chest cavities with their fingers and wresting the balls—the flattened, obscene half orbs of lead—out of the living body. The men screaming, anesthetized with only the slightest dose of laudanum or whiskey. The surgeons cursing when their knives and saws became too dull and hurling them to the ground, rubbing off the blood and gore in the dirt before they went back to work.

Tom and Snatchem had helped to hold Feeley down when it was his turn. The surgeon had twisted and yanked inquisitively in his shoulder, until he had tugged the ball out. Holding it up to the lantern light with a passing, professional interest—

“That was a lucky wound,” he opined, “the bone stopped it flat. Who knows what damage it might have done, and a clean break, at that—” Setting the collarbone back in place while Feeley ground his teeth and cursed a blue streak.

They had left him to rest then, and walked slowly back to their bivouac. There Tom had sat on the ground, and tried to eat some salt pork, and listened to the sounds of the army recovering itself all around him. The artillerymen, and the thick-chested horses, hauling back the guns. The men cleaning their rifles, eating and talking softly among themselves. The whole, long rustle of bridles and metal spurs, bayonets and skillets, wagon wheels and gun wheels, from all up and down the Union position.

He had felt, then, the infinite faith and sadness of all soldiers, knowing that he was part of this much greater thing, this beast. This mighty
machine
made up of men and animals, plans and orders, guns and powder, all around him. And that, for all its might, it would do him no good. Knowing that he would surely be laid out in a field the next day, and peeled off the great body of the army. His spot taken, and his musket handed to someone else. Thinking how damned lovely it all was. Thinking,
I will endure. I will not endure.