Paradise Alley (20 page)

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“They are coming!”

The cry goes out, wild and hopeful and mysterious. Repeated over and over with no further explanation.

“They are coming!”

The mob is pressed into Forty-sixth Street, before the Provost Marshal's office. Waiting as they did last Friday for it to open up, waiting for
—something.
They are a different crowd now, wolfish and expectant.
Almost a mob.
Methodically prying up more paving stones, tearing up the wood fences around the nearby construction sites to use as clubs.

“My God, they are opening up,” a man mutters behind me. I recognize him, a Tammany wardheeler named Eagan. He is not talking to me, simply staring in astonishment at the Provost's office.

Surely he must be wrong. There are thousands of men and women waiting in front of the draft office now, spilling out into the Second and Third Avenues—all of us packed in so tightly we couldn't disperse if we wanted to. Surely they couldn't be so foolish as to open up in the face of that.

But they are. Right on the stroke of nine, the little Invalid guard marches up to the storefront office like the figures on some Bavarian clock tower. The crowd gives a great shout when they swing open the wooden shutters. The sound of blood in their voices, waving their
staves and paving stones in the air. The Provost and his men step into the window, their faces pale and concentrated.

If they had any sense, they would close back up immediately. Instead they go on with their duty—the kind of blind, suicidal obedience that a people learn only in wartime. Marshal Jenkins and his assistants, the known blind name picker. The soldiers mounting the great wooden drum back on its axle. Pouring out their names, the thousands of names from the mob out into the drum, while the noise begins to rise all around them.

The Provost has at least strengthened the guard. There are more bayonets, a few more federal marshals crowding the window. Still, he can have no more than sixty men in all. The soldiers keep up a stout front, hands on their weapons, their eyes fixed straight ahead. But I can see the legs of the known blind man begin to tremble, shying away from the drum like a balky racehorse.

Where are Kennedy's police?
Can it be that his efficient communications system has really broken down so badly? Or are we betrayed—

I try to edge my way out of the crowd. I have some idea of making my way over to the Nineteenth Precinct station house, of getting them to telegraph down to Kennedy's bustling headquarters on Mulberry Street. But it is impossible. The crowd is packed in too tightly to move very far.

“We have to get to the Nineteenth,” I whisper to Eagan, who's a loyal Tammany man but clearly as horrified as I am. “We can wire down from there, Kennedy's got the telegraph all set up—”

“I just came from the Nineteenth,” he murmurs back, careful to keep his voice low. “They know all about it. They just don't believe 'em downtown—”

“How can that be?”

His lips move, but his words are drowned out. The Marshal has started the drum rolling. The soldiers turn it around and around, its thunder echoing up and down the streets of the City.

Everything is still—the crowd overawed by the sheer sound of the drum, just as it had been last Friday. Then all at once a wild movement begins to ripple up and down the street, everyone being pushed and pushing back at once. I am kicked and elbowed, shoved helplessly into Eagan, and for a moment it seems that the rush has already started.

Then I hear the cry again, overwhelming even the martial thunder of the drum:

“THEY ARE COMING!”

The words rise as cheers. Over them I hear the long, shrill blast of a trumpet and hope that somehow the crowd has gotten it wrong—that it is a company of regulars, or Kennedy's Metropolitans come at last.

“They are coming!

“The Black Joke!”

A fire engine and hose wagon are towed down the street from the Third Avenue. The usual entourage of boys, and a man blowing on a silver trumpet, running on ahead. The crowd unable to quite make way before it—men pushed right through the doors and windows of houses along the block—but the rest of them still cheering it on. The firemen in their red shirts and suspenders, and their black, crested helmets, hurtling the wagons through with their usual breakneck speed.

It is No. 33—the Black Joke. They fall to work instantly. Finn McCool directs them himself, standing over the engine box like some wrathful Irish banshee, passing out with both hands the rocks and paving stones they have brought.

“There you go now, boys. Remember, aim high, ye don't want to hit any of the people here—”

Marshal Jenkins and his men stand transfixed in their window, even as the firemen are handing out their missiles. The great roll of the conscription drum goes silent. The known blind man edging slowly back out of the window—

“There you go!”

There is a gunshot, close enough to make Eagan and me, and most of the crowd, duck instinctively. The guard starts, too—Jenkins and his men flinching back from the window. The blind man toppling back into the draft office with a helpless cry. I don't know who fired, one of the guard or someone in the crowd, but it's followed at once by a rain of rocks and paving stones, crashing through the windows, thumping off the hollow draft drum.

The Invalid soldiers stagger back inside, trying to ward off the stones with their arms and rifles. They try to pull the wood shutters closed—but it is too late now. The crowd surges forward, forcing
them open. They pull down the huge wooden drum, smash it on the sidewalk and scatter its names
—their names—
out on the street.

The Provost and his clerks flee out the back—the men of the Black Joke right behind them, scrambling up and through the window. A few soldiers and police try to stop them, but they are beaten mercilessly and tossed back into the crowd, and the rest of the guard break and run. The firemen set quickly about their work, hacking up what remains of the draft office with their axes. It is clear that they know what they are doing, even in this melee, that they have a plan. Pouring turpentine over the floor and setting it ablaze, burning every scrap of paper they can find.

But the rest of the mob is right behind them. They look for any target they can find, however little it has to do with the draft. Within a few minutes they are cutting down telegraph poles, looting a china store next door to the draft office. The sound of smashing plates mingles with the crunch of the flames, and the steady howl of the mob itself. I glare up at McCool, on his engine box, but even he seems a little taken aback by what his men have wrought, his bright, vulture's eyes clouded and uncertain now.

Eagan and I stagger away, toward the Third Avenue—more hordes of Paddies rushing past us to join the fun. Men, women, and boys, their faces as gleeful as the devil's imps, battering at every house and storefront on the block. Others with their arms already loaded down with stacks of china plates, chairs, and cabinets pulled right out of people's kitchens.

I still have some idea of getting to the precinct house, and trying to get another message through to Kennedy. But just as we reach the corner of Third, a carriage pulls up, and out steps the police superintendent himself. He looks much less martial to me now, dressed in civilian clothes and armed with only a rattan cane. His face deathly pale, all the cheery St. Nick confidence and efficiency drained out of it.

“It is madness for you to be here!” Eagan tells him, which is the truth. He has only a single uniformed officer and one of his headquarters clerks with him.

“I had to see for myself,” Kennedy says, nodding apologetically. “I had to confirm it.”

“You can see it all right from here,” Eagan tells him. “Now get back in that carriage and git—”

Instead Kennedy begins to stride toward the mob with his usual briskness. How the surface gestures of men survive even when their inner confidence has died! I cannot say just what he thought he was doing. Perhaps he simply could not believe the scene in front of him. The Provost's office engulfed in flames. The mob beginning to fire the whole block now, flames shooting out through the windows of a dozen stores and homes along Forty-sixth Street.

A group of women who live on the block are trying to plead with the looters. Brave or hysterical, they grab at the rioters' arms, implore them to stop burning their homes. Most of them are Irish themselves—but the men simply jerk their arms away, the mob too intent on their plunder.

I see Kennedy pause for a moment, watching this pathetic scene—then he walks right up to the rioters.

“Where the hell's he going?” I ask Eagan in vain. “You have to get some men up here—”

It is no use, though. Kennedy goes right up to the mob, his clerk and the uniformed officer cursing but chasing loyally after him.

“They'll kill him!” Eagan sputters, incredulous, but most of the rioters seem only bewildered to see this well-dressed gent, with a single policeman, suddenly in their midst. They stop their smashing and thieving for a moment, out of sheer wonder. Kennedy nods gravely to them—and begins to make a speech.

“Fellow citizens! I stand here before you to appeal to your common sense! I will not say a word at present as to the rights of your cause.”

He stands there, holding his arms wide open, like any street-corner Tammany man on election day. The crowd—all of us—still looking on with something like awe.

“About the draft: I know you feel you are right. There is no mistake, it is a hard thing for a man to have to leave his home and go soldiering if he does not wish to go, but I can't argue that question now. You probably feel that you are right in what you have done.”

“He is mad,” Eagan mutters beside me.

Kennedy is completely at the mercy of the mob now. There are no soldiers, no other police left on the block. No one at all, save for
another volunteer fire company, the Honey Bee, that came running when they saw the smoke, and now stand around talking with the men of the Black Joke.

Still, it looks for a moment as if Kennedy might actually pull it off. Surrounded as he is by a group of sobbing women from the block, like a scene out of one of those stage melodramas they are so fond of—

“You came here to do a certain thing. You have done it. Now you ought to be satisfied. The draft office is destroyed, and I appeal to you to let the firemen go to their natural work and save the homes of these poor women. I think the laddies here will back me in this appeal, and do their sacred duty. Will you, sirs? Will you put out the flames?”

He holds out his hand with a grand flourish to McCool, still standing astride his fire engine. Shrunken back out of his heroic pose, now—his whole body cramped up with calculation, shoulders rounded, prematurely wizened head sunk nearly to his chest. McCool hesitates—then slowly nods once, raising his hands like a bishop giving his benediction.

“All right then, lads,” Finn shouts, echoing Kennedy's argument. “We done what we come to do. Let's put these fires out!”

The mob cheers this as well, even the very men who had been setting the fires. It is as if, for a moment, everything might still be put back in place. The firemen leaping back to their engines, attaching their hoses to the green Croton hydrants. Pumping on the great organ handles to build up the pressure—ready to put
out
the fire now, as they are supposed to.

It is then that the mob's de facto leader intervenes. That strange, grizzled bummer from the park, still wearing the board with
NO DRAFT!
chalked on it. I had not seen him since his moment of glory, when he stood in the tracks and hurled his stone through the window of the New Haven train.

Now I notice him again—materializing out of the mob, right in front of the police superintendent. His eyes as sharp and cunning as a rat's. Before anyone can stop him or even say anything, he goes right up to Kennedy and strikes him a terrible blow on the side of the head with his fist. Kennedy tries to dodge it, he tries to block it with his cane. But the bummer is strong and unnaturally quick. He seizes the thin rattan stick and breaks it like a twig—then rears back and strikes
the superintendent again, with his whole forearm this time, knocking him senseless to the ground.