Paradise Alley (39 page)

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The rain fell like a barrage, rattling like grapeshot on the tin and wood roofs of the neighborhood. It woke her youngest two, Vie and Elijiah, who on finding themselves in a strange house in the middle of a storm, immediately began to cry.

“There it is,” Deirdre said to Ruth, sitting across from her in the front parlor, a tone of vindication in her voice. “There's the rain at last, praise Jesus and all the saints. That will drive even the likes of them inside.”

“Aye, it will for tonight,” Ruth agreed, though she was not sure even that much was so.

She had seen what men would put up with for what they wanted, be it rain, or snow, or rivers of shite.

She went to her children where Deirdre had put them up, three to a bed, in the back and the upstairs rooms. Deirdre went with her, again, much to her surprise. Helping Ruth to calm them, shooing her own children back to bed. Ruth felt the tears welling up in her eyes, and she brushed them hurriedly away. Yet she could not help thinking that this was what she had always wanted, ever since she had moved onto the block.
The two of them like sisters, moving among beds full of babies.

She rubbed their backs and fetched them each a ladle of water from one of the buckets in the corner. Gazing out the window as she
tended to them—the sky all orange now, and luminous, the clouds reflecting back the fires burning all over the City.

Humming a lullaby, she made the children lie back down in the bed while she ran a hand over their heads. Vie felt warmer than she should, so Ruth went back into the parlor to find a cloth she might wet down, and lay over her brow. She did not want to bother Deirdre, still in with her own children, so she began to search on her own, looking through the looming, ebony secretary first.

She pulled open the top drawer—and found the newspaper. The name popping right out at her. Her reading was still such that she almost never looked at the papers, intimidated by their cramped, tiny print, and the multitude of words. But his name came up at her immediately. She sounded it out to herself, lips moving silently as she read the column where the page was folded:

“W
OUNDED
:

. . . O'Kane, Tom, 69th New York, Co. A—leg”

Ruth stepped away, dropping the newspaper in the drawer as if it had been something hot or sharp. Deirdre came in holding a pan of water in her hand, and she turned to her at once. Embarrassed to be caught so, looking through her things, but full of pity for her nevertheless.

“Oh, Deirdre,” she said. “Oh, you poor girl. How long did you know, then?”

Deirdre said nothing at first, carefully placing the pan of water down on a chair. Then she lowered her head before Ruth, and held out a hand to her.

“It's a judgment against me,” she said, and began to weep. “A judgment on the hardness of my heart.”

“A judgment?” Ruth repeated, confused. “But what've you ever been, Deirdre, but a good mother an' a virtuous wife?”

“The Lord knows, I should have taken you in already,” she only insisted, wiping at her eyes, her hand still squeezing Ruth's. “I should have took care of you years ago, you and your family. It's a judgment on me that I did not.”

She lifted her head—her face still distraught, and so contrite that Ruth could only hold her and try to comfort her.

“There now, there now. It must've been a shock to ye. Is there nothin' else? No other word on Tom?”

“Nothing yet.”

Deirdre began to cry again, muffling her sobs in Ruth's shoulder while Ruth patted her hair and back.

“Well, that's good, then,” Ruth said, determinedly, trying to ignore how the bottom had fallen out of her own stomach.
Trying not to think about Billy.
“It's not so bad as the last time, anyway, when he was gone missing. He lived through that, didn' he? An' the fever in the hospital, an' all the conditions. This won't be but a scratch to him, big, strong man like he is—”

Though they both knew how many ways there were for a man to die from a scratch, down in the Washington hospitals. They had heard all the stories from the other women in Paradise Alley who had lost husbands, sons, brothers.
They died from legs that went bad, and the littlest wounds, that turned to gangrene. They died just sitting in camp, from the consumption, or the bloody flux. Leaving whole families of six and seven, to fend for themselves on the streets of New York—

“But I blamed you for it. I blamed you for everything,” Deirdre told her. “I blamed you for Johnny, even though I knew what he was, and then I blamed you for getting Tom to help you. God help me, but I blamed you for the war, too, you and your coloreds. For taking Tom off—even though I knew it was me that talked him into going.”

Deirdre lowered her head before her again.

“But how could ya help it?” Ruth told her. “You had a respectable home. God only knows, the way me an' Johnny must've seemed to ya—”

“But I should have helped you! I should have made my home your home. I should've done that much for you, at least.”

Ruth felt the tears in her own eyes, despite herself. Trying to think of something, anything she could say to Deirdre. Then she was crying, too—so hard that the two women had to sit down together on the sofa. She gripped Deirdre's arms there, trying to show her that she forgave her. Trying to hold her so she would not think any more on those years, on all the times she had stood like a beggar outside Deirdre's door.

It's done now. It's all done, anyway.

“But I blamed you for everything, and for Johnny, especially after
the business with Old Man Noe,” Deirdre insisted, when they were able to talk again.

“Ah, now. It's all right.”

“I blamed you for all that. The night you came to the house—”

“I know, I know. But the thing was, you wasn't so wrong.”

The sky had been orange that night, too. It was snowing, but there were distant claps of thunder, and the boom of the ice floes as they broke and smashed in the North River.

She had pulled the bell, then pounded at the front door. Knowing how Deirdre would consider it unrespectable even to acknowledge a caller at such an hour. Persisting, knocking and knocking, until Tom had answered the door, and pulled her on into the parlor.

Such a pleasant hour it looked in there.
She was still jealous, she had to admit. Deirdre in her chair by the clean and odorless Argand lamp, with some book of devotional stories. Tom in his shirtsleeves, a copy of the
Tribune
still in his hand and a pair of reading spectacles hanging incongruously from his nose. The children already tucked into bed, the two of them reading bits to each other.

Ruth had felt the cold ripple of spite running through her. Knowing that she was come to overturn it all, this whole, perfectly arranged world of Deirdre's.

She had brought the cane with her, though she knew it was taking her life in her hands. Dolan would kill her for such a thing, and had she been stopped by a nab, she did not know what she would have done. She had managed to find a sheet of canvas from a construction site, wrapping the cane up with some sagging, discarded chimney brooms around it. Walking it all the way down from Pigtown, too fearful even to take an omnibus or a streetcar.

Dolan had thought to keep her ignorant about the crime. Daring her to ask about it, trying to overawe her into thinking it was just another of his mysterious jobs. But Ruth knew it was something more. He had stopped going out at all, even to fence the goods he had brought back. Prowling more and more restlessly around the shanty.

As soon as she had an excuse to go out, she had spent a penny on the
Herald.
Running it over to Billy's as quickly as she could. She had not wanted him to have anything to do with it, but who else could she ask. She told him to read the whole paper to her, refusing to say what
it was she was on about, and he had made his way through it slowly, suspiciously, sneaking glances at her as he did to gauge her reaction.

But it was right there on the front page. She knew it at once:
A Mr. James H. Noe, prominent brush manufacturer, found bludgeoned to death at a new factory he was erecting on Greenwich Street.
The
Herald
ran through all the grisly details, both real and rumored. How Old Man Noe was thought to have put up a fight. The body robbed and mutilated, one or both of its eyes gouged out. His walking stick, crowned with the gold head of a dog, gone missing—presumed stolen by the murderer.

There were plenty of eyes in the City that needed putting out. But only that one walking stick.

Ruth had all she could do to keep from leaping up when Billy read her the story. Fighting hard to control herself, to keep any sign of her emotions from showing. And when he was finished with the story, Billy Dove lowered the newspaper, and looked directly at her sitting on his bed.

“So he was the one who did it.”

After that, she had had to confess everything—even that she was with child, and she did not know if it was his. Bursting into tears to have him know anything about it at all. And Billy had listened to everything she said, without showing any expression, until she finished and he nodded and said to her:

“How should we kill him, then?”

She would not let Billy do anything like that. She could keep him from that much, at least. But striding back across the fields she had felt exultant. The feeling undiminished even as she approached the shanty again, and she could feel Dolan eyeing her through the boards. She knew she would have to be especially careful. That he would be watching her all the time, and she was careful to hang her head as she got closer, slumping her shoulders.
Trying to blot out her triumph, and remember the way she felt, returning to him every night. Making herself forget that was all about to end.

Dolan did not leave the house again the next day, or the day after. Growing more and more jumpy and morose, when he wasn't drunk. No longer bothering to shave or clean himself at all, only peering out the door and the cracks in the walls at the frozen, wintry fields.

On the third afternoon, she returned from the markets to find that
he had buried the walking stick in the yard. It was hidden under the snow, down in the fissure of another huge grey split of rock. The hiding place cunningly disguised, heaped up with snow again. But she could tell where it was, she had scoured every inch of their tiny patch of yard for the past year, if only longing to be away from it.

Back inside Dolan was more agitated than ever, stomping about the shanty and rubbing his arms like a madman—his eyes as red as live coals.

“We should clear out,” he told her. “We should get out now, while we can. Off this goddamned island.”

“Why don't we, then,” she had said carefully.

“
No, goddamn ye!
They'll sell me, sell me's soon as I take a foot out the door. We got to burrow in here. We got to stay inside, till the winter's out.”

She had to wait for hours, until he calmed himself with the jug, and finally fell asleep across the bed. Then, when the winter sun was already beginning to set over the North River, spreading needles of purple and orange light across the pitted fields, she had gone out and dug up the things he had buried.

She had pulled up the cane and all the rest of his stash, bundling it up with the canvas, and the chimney brooms she had found. Walking all the long way down to Paradise Alley in the Fourth Ward. Not even willing to ask Billy to accompany her, for fear of what the sight of them together, a white woman and a black man, might arouse. Petrified as it was that Dolan should awake, or that a roundsman should stop her.

“What're you on about? What do you mean, bringing those into my house?” Deirdre had said when she stepped into her front room with her bundle.

Standing up from her chair, a look of defiance but also growing fear in her face, as if she already had some presentiment of why Ruth had come. Her voice rising until it was nearly hysterical.