Captains and The Kings (6 page)

It was a gritty, dusty, barren little town, ugly even under summer skies and beside the rushing green river. The churches appeared drab and listless; the public buildings showed a penurious hand, the cobbled streets were usually dirty and ill-kept. There was no grandeur or pleasant vista anywhere, no parks, no open flowery spots or many trees. It was avoided by travelers, which was exactly what the inhabitants desired, and so there were few inns and no "wicked" theaters or halls of music. Its square, on a Saturday, teemed only with farmers who "came to town" to gawk or drink or lean against buildings and talk, while their women shopped in the plain poor stores for necessities. The streets were narrow and dull, faced with smeared windows and doors opening directly on planked and broken walks. There were few gardens in the rear, for grit was everywhere from neglect and from the small factories and sawmills. The only bright and interesting spectacle in the town was on the riverfront where the squatters dwelt in shacks and the steamboats paddled noisily up and down the stream to other and more interesting cities. The rich authorities of the town really lived in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, or they had homes in the radiant green hills some three miles away where beauty and gaiety and lavishness were not limited. For the great majority of the poor inhabitants there was no joy and little pleasure but the saloons and walks through the streets and endless "prayer meetings," and endless sermons and devotions in the many churches, and family gatherings for Sunday dinner in dark little rooms, or solemn discussions of the "Roman Menace," and missions to the heathen and the iniquity of slavery and the corruption of "that dinky little government in Washington," which was far, far away. Mr. Lincoln had just been elected President but even those who had voted for him denounced him now though he had not yet taken office. Many of the inhabitants had come from the stark hills of Kentucky or the Tidewater area of Virginia to "work on the railroad" or in the factories and the sawmills, and for them the natives of Winfield had adopted the Southern appellation of "white trash." These people carried with them their folkways of speaking and life and so the men and women of Winfield were titillated by a sense of superiority to the "hillbillies." To Joseph Armagh, Winfield was repulsive, alien, and lightless. Its ugliness and lack of color disgusted him. The voices he heard were strange and discordant. Its lack of human diversity and lively movement depressed him. It was a gray prison and often he felt that he was smothering. His loneliness frequently overwhelmed him with despair of so active a nature that it was like an ague. The sweltering summers made him gasp beyond endurance and the winters were a long suffering. He had lived here for three years and knew no one but the Sisters in the St. Agnes's Orphanage, and he had little conversation with his fellow workers in the sawmill. They shunned him, for he was a "foreigner" and therefore suspect. He was never seen to laugh or to engage in gossip nor heard to utter an oath. This was more than enough, with his lilting brogue, to incite enmity and ridicule. To the few who knew of Winfield it was known as a "real quiet small town," but to the people of Virginia who had to deal with it it was "that there mud hole up North." The Sabbath evening was closing in this late November day while Joseph walked towards the orphanage which he visited once a week. He hurried, for it would soon be too late for visitors. A dim and dirty drizzle began to fall and there was a dank wind from the river and the houses and streets became increasingly blank and glum and anonymous. A slimy moisture began to glisten on the stones where a dull lamppost blew down its feeble light. The few trees flung their stiff webby shadows on brown walls and gloomy little houses, and they uttered a dry and crackling roar. The last daylight showed a racing mass of black clouds against a pallid grayness. Joseph plunged his chilled hands into the pockets of his too-short greatcoat which he had bought, secondhand, nearly two years ago. Even then it had been thin and cheap and of the shabbiest material, blackish and coarse, with a grubby velvet collar. Now it barely covered his knees and hardly stretched across his broad shoulders. He wore the woolen cap with a visor that all workingmen wore, as brown as earth. He possessed no gloves, no waistcoats, no cravats. His sleazy shirts were clean if cheap. To Joseph a man did not reach total degradation until he neglected soap and water and to that degradation he would not fall. A cake of pungent soap cost three cents, the price of a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and cheese. When he had to choose between them he bought the soap. But hunger was an old familiar to him and had his young appetite ever been satisfied he would, now, not have recognized the sensation or it would have made him uncomfortable. It had been years since he had eaten his fill and the memory was becoming vague. Still, he was always haunted by a sick craving and sometimes a shaking weakness, and sometimes he would be covered by a prickling sweat, the result of weariness and semistarvation. He walked proudly and swiftly, not bowing his head before the drizzle. He could smell the wet dust of the streets, and the dead leaves in the gutter. The river wind exhaled an odor of fishy cold water, and a rancid stench of oil blew from somewhere. His pale young face was set but otherwise it expressed no emotion. He had learned that he must endure, and the Irish genius for endurance was strong in him. He passed a small livery stable in which a yellow light burned, and he saw the accustomed sign on the closed doors: No irish hired. With this, too, he was familiar. He felt himself fortunate that he had his job on the river sawmills and never could regret that he had called himself a Scotsman in order to obtain work. A man must do as he must do, old Father O'Leary had once told him, but hardly in the context in which Joseph now found himself. However, it became the interior warrior cry of Joseph Armagh. He had not created the world in which he was forced to live, nor did he feel, or ever feel, that he was truly a part of it. He must survive. Self-pity was as repulsive to him as sentimentality, and a compassionate glance-which he received only from the nuns and the priest of St. Agnes's Church-filled him with a bitter rage as at a monstrous insult.
He passed the filthy little saloons with the shut doors and the dark windows, and knew that in the rear revelry "on the Sabbath" was in full voice. He hesitated. He was thirsty, and a mug of beer would be satisfying. But he had but fifty cents in one pocket, and payday was not until Tuesday, and in the meantime lie had to give his aching stomach some sustenance. In another pocket, pinned securely, was the two-dollar bill which he would give to the Sister Superior tonight for the weekly board of his brother and sister. So long as he supported Scan and Regina they could never be taken from him on the plea that they were indigent orphans. He was recovering from a cold. He coughed harshly and noisily once or twice, and then spat. The rain was now pelting. He began a half-run. Against a sky becoming steadily darker he could see the steeple of St. Agnes's Church, a miserable little building which had once been a barn, all gray walls and peeling paint and narrow plain glass windows and shingled roof which leaked during bad storms. It was open only for Sunday Mass, a single Mass, and for the morning Mass during the weekdays. Otherwise it was locked, for fear of vandals. An old watchman slept behind the sacristy armed with a club, a venerable and penniless old man whom a heavy winter gale could make stagger or fall. But he believed both in God and his club, and slept sweetly. Next to the church stood an equally miserable building, a little smaller, which had also been a big barn long ago, but which now housed five nuns and some forty children without homes or guardians. Somehow the nuns had gathered together enough money to enlarge the barn and make it a two-story and ramshackle affair of wood and odds and ends of curious lumber, and somehow they had furnished it cleanly if meagerly. It stood, with the church, on a small plot of land which the men of the parish kept green and neat in the summer. The women of the parish, almost as destitute as the Sisters, planted flower seeds against the sifting walls of both church and orphanage, and during the summer the desperate poverty of both buildings was partly alleviated by the living light of blossoms and green leaves. The people of the parish, to the rest of the inhabitants of Winfield, were pariah dogs, fit only for the dirtiest and most revolting work which not even the "river scum" would accept. They were also the poorest paid. Their women worked in the houses of their superiors for small rations of food and two or three dollars a month. They brought the food home nightly to their families. The only joy any of them possessed was an occasional mug of beer, and their Church, and their Faith. Joseph Armagh never entered that church. He never mingled with the people. He regarded them as dispassionately as he did the other people of Winfield, and with the same far indifference. They had nothing to do with him, and his life, and the thoughts he thought, and the stony determination that lived in him like a dark fire. Once Father Barton, accosting him deliberately as he left the orphanage, had tried to soften that taciturn and obdurate young man and had attempted to engage him in conversation beyond the few words Joseph would give him. He asked Joseph why he never attended Mass, and Joseph said nothing. "Ah, I know it is the Irish bitterness in you," said the young priest with sadness. "You remember Ireland, and the English. But here, in America, we are free." "Free-for what, Father?" The priest had looked at him earnestly, and then had winced at the sight of Joseph's face. "To live," he had murmured. Joseph had burst out into ugly laughter, then, and had left him. The priest then spoke of Joseph to the Superior of the combined convent and orphanage, Sister Elizabeth, a small portly middle-aged woman with a kind and sensible face and gentle eyes, but also with a grim mouth and a will that, Father Barton suspected, not even God could bend. She was not the conventional docile and obedient nun whom Father Barton believed had comforted his bleak childhood. She feared no one-and possibly not even God, the priest also suspected with some interior misgivings, and she had a worldly brief smile and an impatient air of tolerance when he delivered some small homily or pious aphorism to her. When he became particularly ethereal she would say quickly and with an abrupt motion of her small fat hand, "Yes, yes, Father, but that will not buy any potatoes, I am thinking." It was her famous reply to any maudlin remark or sentimental dithering on the part of anyone. Father Barton had said to her, "Joseph Armagh, Sister. I confess that he troubles me, for though he is very young he seems to have had experiences far beyond his age, and has become hard and vindictive over them, and unforgiving, and perhaps even vengeful." Sister Elizabeth considered, fixing her eyes upon the priest for several moments. Then she said, "He has his reasons, Father, with which you and I may not agree, but they are his reasons, born out of sorrow, and he must find his way alone." "He needs the help of his Church, and his God," said the priest. "Father, has it ever occurred to you that Joseph has no church, and no God?" "At so young an age?" The priest's voice trembled. "Father, he is not young, and it is possible that he never was." With that reply she had closed the conversation and had bustled away, her wooden beads clicking, and the priest had gazed after her and had wondered, wretchedly, how it was that in these days the Religious seemed more concerned over matters of the world than in their hope of heaven. Smarting a little, he remembered: "But that will not buy any potatoes." Once he had thought to say, "God will provide," but he guessed at once that Sister Elizabeth was waiting for him to make just that remark so she could pounce, and so he had refrained, flinching. Joseph was not thinking, tonight, of either Father Barton or Sister Elizabeth, for they were no more to him than anyone else. They merely existed, as others in his world existed, and he never permitted them to approach him, not because he resented or respected them-for he did neither-but because he knew they were not part of his life at all and represented nothing to him of any value except that the nun sheltered and fed his brother and sister until the day when he could take them from her. He had no more animosity towards them than he had for the rest of the world of men and women, for he knew now that personal animosity brought people more sharply towards you, made you aware of their being, and there was no time for this or any other wasteful emotion like it. There would be no intrusion into his existence by any stranger, for that weakened a man. He had no curiosity about others, no sense of fellowship with those about him, no pity, no hostility, no longing for companionship for all the loneliness that tortured him frequently. On another occasion Father Barton had said to him, knowing his history, "Joseph, there are multitudes of people in this country, and not only from Ireland, who have suffered and have lost as you suffered and lost. Yet, they do not turn away from others." Joseph had stared at him without expression. "I neither turn away nor turn to, Father. I am as I was made. The same anvil and hammer create horseshoes and knives and harness and nails and a thousand other things, and not only one. The same experiences turn one man this way, and another the other way, and it is in their nature." The priest had marveled at this, for Joseph had been but fifteen then, and then he was frightened for he vaguely felt that he was confronting a phenomenon new to him, and terrifying, for it was like a natural force which no man dared refute or defy, but only accept. The thought filled the priest with sadness and fear. Then he remembered that one young nun had shyly told him, "Joseph loves his brother and his sister, Father, and he would die for them. I have seen it on his face, the poor lamb." But lately the priest had begun to believe that the nun was mistaken. Joseph reached the orphanage with its faint yellow lamps shining through the clean bare windows, and its whitened stone steps and its bare facade. Then he paused. Standing at the curb was a wonderful equipage which he had never seen before in America but only coming or going to the great houses of the landed gentry in Ireland. It was a sleek and blackly polished closed carriage, with a coachman on its high seat, and with glittering windows and varnished wheels. Two horses drew it, as black as the carriage itself, and as sleek, and their harness gleamed like silver in the faint lamplight nearby. Joseph stared, and the coachman, in his thick greatcoat and tall beaver hat, stared back at him. His gloved hands held a whip. Now, thought Joseph, what is such a carriage as this doing here, before this orphanage, and on this street? It is fit for the Queen, herself, or the President of the United States of America. "And what'll ye have?" said the coachman, in an unmistakably Irish brogue. "Get on with ye, boyo, and stop gowpin' like a fish. Or I'll fetch ye a clout." The first curiosity Joseph had felt for years stirred him, but he shrugged and went up the shallow steps of the orphanage and pulled the bell. A young nun, Sister Frances, opened the door and smiled at him, though he never smiled in answer. "And it's very late, Joseph," she said. "The children have supped and are at their prayers before bed." Joseph entered the damp hall without reply, though he wiped his feet on the bristled rug at the door very carefully. The nun closed the door after him. "Only five minutes, Joseph," she said. "You'll wait in the parlor, as usual, and then I'll see." The bare and splintered wood floor was painfully clean and polished, and so were the wooden walls. To the left was Sister Elizabeth's special "parlor" where she had mysterious and weighty discussions, and to the right was a small "reception room," as the young nuns called it, for such as Joseph. At the end of the hall was a long narrow room, hardly more than a corridor for indeed it once stabled a number of horses in their stalls. Now the nuns called it "our refectory," and here they ate their sparse meals and here, with them, ate the orphans. At the end of the "refectory" was the kitchen which, in winter, was the only really warm spot in the orphanage, and a favorite gathering place for the Sisters who sewed here and spent their recreation time and chatted, and even laughed and sang, and discussed their sad little charges and even, though this was sinful, Sister Elizabeth. Some kind and partially affluent soul had donated the three rocking chairs near the huge black iron stove which was set in the red brick wall, and the nuns' hands had cleaned and polished the brick floor. There was always an enormous iron pot of soup steaming away over the embers in the stove, and to nuns and children it had the most delightful scent in the world. On the second floor slept the children in their crowded cots, and beyond a door slept the nuns in similar community. Only Sister Elizabeth had privacy, her space hidden behind a heavy brown curtain. The schoolroom for the children was the church, itself, "while we wait," said the nuns, "for a real school to be built." Their hopes never faltered though Sister Elizabeth was less sanguine. "We will make do," she would say. The outside privies were sheltered from public gaze by being enclosed at the end of a rough wooden tunnel built by the nuns, themselves, and it led from the kitchen door. Bare and cold though the orphanage- convent was, the nuns, several of them from Ireland within the past few years, thought of it as the dearest and most contented home, and their faces, in the warm kitchen, were bright in the lamplight as they worked and innocently gossiped. Sometimes a sick and very young child would be brought here, wrapped in shawls, to be rocked by a nun, and soothed and petted even at night, until he slept against the immaculate but maternal breast and was carried upstairs to the murmur of a prayer. No hunger of the stomach was ever fully appeased in this building but the nuns counted themselves as blessed in this community of genuine hope, faith, and charity. Joseph went into the little reception room which was as chill as death and dank, and smelled of beeswax and generous amounts of soap. The walls were white-plastered, and nothing the nuns could do could remove the stains of damp permanently. The floor was polished to a dark brightness, and the room contained a table covered with a coarse linen cloth bordered with coarser lace, and held the convent's cherished Bible bound in moldering red leather, and nothing else except a lighted kerosene lamp. A tiny window near the ceiling let in the only daylight but never any sun, and there were four straight kitchen chairs ranged stiffly against the walls. But on a wall pedestal stood a small and badly executed statue of Our Lady Help of Christians, all cheap gilt and poisonous blue and glaring white, with a gilded halo. In the very center of the same wall hung a very large wooden crucifix of dark wood, and the Corpus upon it was miraculously executed in old ivory. This had belonged for generations to Sister Elizabeth's family in Ireland, and she had carried it to America when she was a very young nun and it was her treasure, and the treasure of the convent-orphanage. It had been suggested to her that the high altar jn the church was the most fitting place for it, but Sister Elizabeth sought out the dingiest room in the convent in which to place it. No one knew her reason and she never replied to questions, but almost all who entered the reception room were moved by it, some to sorrow, some to rebellion, some to peace, and some to absolute indifference, such as Joseph Armagh. Fie sat on one of the stiff chairs and shivered, and he wondered, with alarm, if he had got another chill in the rain. The only fear that he ever allowed himself was the fear of desperate illness and unemployment and beggary, for he believed that in that event he would never see his brother and sister again, and they would be given for adoption to strangers whose names he would never know. None in Winfield had ever mentioned or hinted it, but he was convinced of it, remembering old Father O'Leary who had brought the family to this place and then had died but a month later. Joseph waited for his family, and he shivered again and remembered that he had had but one small meal today-all he could afford-and that a poor one of bread and cold bacon and black coffee in his boardinghouse. He was also cramped by pangs of hunger, and he rubbed his cold hands together and tried not to think of food. He raised his eyes and they encountered the crucifix, and for the first time he was aware of it clearly and there was a sudden and darkly violent convulsion in him. "Sure, and You never helped anyone," he said aloud. "It is all