Paradise Alley (19 page)

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Something had to be done, that much was clear, for they had been meddled with once too often.
Thirty men.
Thirty men drafted from his own fire company on the first day, including the brother, Peter, captain of the Black Joke himself.

All weekend long, he had gone from the bars, to the backroom clubhouses, to the groceries. Talking to aldermen, and committeemen, and the captains of other volunteer companies. Not plotting, exactly. Nobody had done anything like that. They were too good, too experienced as politicians to say anything directly, even in the back rooms of their own taverns and houses.

But they were in agreement—Tammany Hall and Mozart Hall and the independents.
Something
had to be done. Without the men there could be no hands to pull the engines through the streets, or to brawl over the hydrants, or to steal ballot boxes on Election Day. Without the companies there could be no organization, anywhere, and without the organization there was—chaos.

Something had to be done—and it was the machine itself that would do it, which pleased him. It was a fine, modern thing, painted by an Irishman, constructed by Irish carpenters and metalsmiths. It was a useful thing, too, a fire engine. Something absolutely indispensable,
unlike the cumbersome new street-cleaning machines that existed only to take a man's job.

He sat before it now, alone in the firehouse. The Black Joke,
Old Bombazula,
as they called it. The great copper engine, enthroned in the middle of its heavy wagon. Two rows of thick piano-pump handles running down either side where the men would stand, working like demons—like machines themselves—as they pumped the water through.

Most of all, though, he loved the images, the shapes and signs that were painted across nearly every inch of the high, black wagon. There were scenes from the life of Rip Van Winkle, and Washington crossing the Delaware, and old Pete Stuyvesant, with his one leg, defying the British. There was the privateer from the War of 1812 the engine was named for, the original
Black Joke
herself, swooping down on an English frigate.

On the back of the hardwood engine case was a painting of a great fire, burning out of control, somewhere out on the Western prairies. And on the front was the company's motto, stenciled in gold paint: “
THE NOBLEST MOTIVE IS THE PUBLIC GOOD.
”

Now the wagon was packed with rocks, all around the engine—rocks, and paving stones, and the fragments of brick they had been able to salvage from the construction site, at the old De Peyster place. The hose wagon filled with them, too. When they ran both wagons out to the Provost's office, the leatherheads and the soldiers would never see it coming in time.
But then they would know. Then they would show all the niggers and the nigger lovers they were serious. That you could not interfere with free men in such a way—

Still, Finn wasn't sure. He walked restlessly around the machine, going over everything. Stopping the draft would mean fighting, no matter how they cut it. Fighting meant having to leave something to chance, and Finn McCool didn't like chance in politics any more than he liked it in the faro games he ran down on Pearl Street; to him chance was the very
opposite
of politics.

But there was no way around it, the Republicans had brought this on themselves. It was bad enough when they had forced the war, and split the national Democracy down the middle. That had only been smart politics, Finn had almost admired it, and neither he nor anyone
else down at the saloon or the firehouse really gave a rat's ass about the fate of a few cotton planters.

But this was something else. Now they really meant to kill them, at home and in the field.
Sitting at home on their shoddy profits, while they were sold like niggers down to Virginia—

“They're comin' out!”

A boy came racing through the firehouse door, shouting and jabbering, fairly bursting with the news he had to tell.

“They're comin' out, all up Corlear's Hook, an' the East River docks! They stopped the New Haven line, too—smashed the express to pieces with the paving stones!”

The boy's face was covered with blood and soot from God only knew where. So dark that McCool thought he was a colored child at first, and he had jumped at the sight of him. But then the boy had grinned—a big, jack-o'-lantern grin, through all the gore, and he had recognized him.
Henry McCarty,
from over in Greene Street. One of the many boy runners the company used, to race out to the fires before them, and find the Croton hydrants.

Finn had posted them all over town the night before—just another precaution to let him know what was going on. He started to question the boy about just what he had seen, but even as he did, more runners, more boys started to come in, faces flushed and excited, telling him all about the broken train, the long columns of men moving uptown along the East Side docks and avenues. He nodded solemnly, satisfied—trying to calculate as he did how long it would take them to get up to the Provost's office, how much of a head start he should give them.

Soon the men of the company began to drift in, as ordered. The volunteers of the Black Joke Fire Company, No. 33. Dressed in their best uniforms, their red shirts and shiny black suspenders and pants, the splendid, black and gold-buttoned jackets they'd worn only for the grand review for the Prince of Wales. Looking only a little the worse for the beer and the lager he had treated them to all weekend, at The Sailor's Rest and other saloons all over the Fourth Ward. Where he had pounded the same points into them, over and over again, at the bar rail:

“They already drafted Pete, our captain, an' you know we can't let that stand. Thirty men
—thirty!—
just from the company—

“And who's to put out the fires, an' save the women an' children, an' babes in arms? You notice, they're not draftin' any of the Metropolitans. Not while there's still heads to be broke, an' families to be turned out of doors—”

Once he had them going about such things, and as to how their wives and children were to support themselves on a soldier's pay, he would pause just long enough before bringing up the price.

“Three hundred dollars, and a man
—any
man, they say—can buy hisself out of the war. Just three hundred and he can hire a substitute to go down an' do his fighting for him.”

Pausing just long enough—then bringing out the flier he had gotten, the bill of auction taken off a blackbirder named Flask, a slave trader the navy had picked up off Long Island Sound, and hauled in for trial in the City. The bold print and drawing easily comprehensible, even to the illiterate. The auction block there, and the half-naked colored men and women and tykes in manacles. The cultured gentlemen with their frock coats and sticks looking them over.

The prices, read right out there: “BUCKS—$1,000; WOMEN WITH CHILD—$1,500—”

Letting the bill of auction—which he'd already had reprinted in the thousands—fall lightly to the beer-soaked bar. Before stating the obvious, which was after all, his profession.

“Sold for three hundred dollars. When—”

He didn't even have to finish the sentence before they were yelling, all but screaming over the hateful comparison.

Not that he didn't believe it. They would have to settle that score, as well. Saturday night he had gone down there again, to the house by Paradise Alley. Quietly at first, as quiet as he could go on that street full of darkie families, and half-castes, and whores with their children. He had walked around and around the house, trying to see past the red curtains in the first-floor windows. Trying to get a glimpse of her with one of
them,
in the act.

As if he needed to prove it to himself.
He knew that she took the colored trade. It enraged him just to think about it, it was one of the very few things that ever made Finn truly angry.
It wasn't right—having to share even our whores with them.
Like fornicating with donkeys, it was a wonder they didn't rip the likes of her apart, the little whore, spoil her for any honest workingman—

That was the limit. They should be above the likes of
them,
at least. His fury had gotten the better of him, for once, the only time it ever did, when he was down there. He had stopped skulking around the windows, and seized with his anger had stood and pounded on the front door until she had answered.

Laughing, right in the middle of laughing. The fine, silken yellow dressing gown clutched up over her breasts and obviously not so much as a petticoat on underneath. Laughing as she had that time, when he had asked her if she did it with such people—with himself hard as an ax handle.

“Are they like us, then? Are they like us down there?”

He was serious, but she had kept laughing—his erection diminishing.

“It don't matter! You men only like to think about your things. But the truth is, one is just like another.”

But it did matter, that was the thing. It did matter, they weren't alike at all and she should know it. That should be the least they could expect, even from a whore, that they wouldn't have to share with dogs, or apes—

He had lost himself all over again when she'd answered like that, just in her gown. He had let his anger take hold of him.

“We'll see to yer niggers,” he had told her, right out there in the street like that, where anyone could hear.

He didn't know what had gotten hold of him, but he meant it. He meant it now. They would settle with all the whores, and all the niggers, too. For getting them sent off to the war, and trying to take their jobs, and stealing their women, even if they were just whores.
They would settle with all of them.

The men stood before him now, in their best uniforms, waiting for his word. Finn leaped up on the engine case, above the scene of the wild prairie fire, sweeping over the plains. Holding out his hands to still their chatter.

“Now, men. Now, men,” he told them. “It's time to see what you are made of, as true Americans, an' Irishmen, too.”

They cheered him to the rafters. Shouting the rallying cry of the engine company, the yell they would give on their way to a fire—

“All Black and Never Been Washed!”

A smile began to spread slowly across Finn's lips, the men smiling back at him.

“Well now, boys, I think it's time we went and paid a visit to the Provost Marshal's office. Are ye with me, then?”

Their cheer was deafening in the little firehouse.

“Burn out all the sons of bitches!”

“The street machines! Burn them first!”

“Then the hotels!”

Finn grinned benignly back at them—though that was the kind of talk that made him uneasy.
That was why you needed the organization, anytime you let men off the leash things were liable to get out of hand—

“All in good time, all in good time!” he shouted above the din. “But first the Provost's. First the draft records!”

They fell into position around the engine, and the hose wagons—their hands on the harness guides and the organ pumps. Shoving the high black canvas hats down on their heads like so many helmets.

“Look lively now, lads, look lively!”

He called out their drill. The men in their traces. The boy runners jumping and up down in their wild excitement. Cassius Keahny standing in front, his silver horn in hand. Finn McCool held up his right arm.

“All right, then—will you pull, lads?”

“Aye, we'll pull!”

“Will you work, lads?”

“Aye, we'll work!”

“All right, then. Let's paint the old gal green!”

McCool brought his arm down, the older boy runners sliding the front doors of the firehouse open on cue. Keahny out on the street, blowing blast after blast on his silver horn. The rest of them close behind. Finn, sitting up by the engine, calling the pace. Looking down he saw that boy again, Henry McCarty, grinning ecstatically as he ran along, trying to keep up. He could not help but grin back at him as they ran the engine out under the unforgiving sun.