Paradise Alley (56 page)

“Yes. Yes, I have seen it.”

He shakes his head, his face haggard and dazed.

“They will never forgive us.
Never.
D'you know the mob tore down the Colored Orphans' Asylum? Wanted to burn the university—”

“Is there anything the Archbishop can do?”

“The governor asked him to give a speech.” Father Knapp shakes his head. “A
speech.
There are priests out all over the City, tryin' to stop them. It doesn't matter.
They will never forgive us—
”

There is a commotion down the block, and both our heads turn toward it, wondering if the troops have returned—or the mob. Then we see him, wheeling a wagon up to his house. It is Colonel O'Brien of the 11th Volunteers himself, returning to the same street where he had led his troops a few hours before.

I will never know what has led him to return. He owns a house in Thirty-fifth Street, and some claim he came back to see that his family is all right.

But why like this?
Whatever has made him think he could come back in full uniform, without any kind of escort? Did he believe that, once the street was cleared, it would stay that way? Cleansed and subdued, properly restored to civilization. Or is it the other way around—that he simply could not believe, despite what he had seen with his own eyes, that his friends and neighbors had all become savages in the course of an afternoon?

Whatever it is that is driving him, he brings his wagon right up to the door of his home. Pulling the horses up with one quick, deft tug, jumping down smartly from the wagon seat. Maintaining his soldier's bearing at all times, his pressed blue uniform still unmarred, gold buttons glimmering.

“It's him!”

They recognize him at once—just as they had a little while ago, when he returned to his block with two companies of soldiers. The voices rising steadily along the street, sounding astonished.

“It's him, all right! What shot Ellen Kirk, an' Mulhare's boy!”

“There's the man!”

Their cries angry now—and eager. They are moving before his feet touch the ground. The mob reassembling instantly, emerging from the houses and the bars, and all the secret places they know of. Before we can so much as shout a warning to the man, a brick thunks off the side of his wagon, then another one. Three large men emerge from a saloon across the street and make straight for him—a whole crowd at their heels.

O'Brien stands his ground, and fights them off.
He is a strong man, that will be his undoing.
He draws his sword as soon as he sees them,
cuts one man's arm to the bone, slashes the next one across the face. These are just warning swipes, but expert and effective. The third Celt brute manages to close with him, mauling at his face. He is a big, brawny man, a butcher's apprentice, the bloody apron still wrapped around his waist. But despite his size O'Brien is able to get one hand free, knock him senseless with the hilt of his sword.

By now, I think, he understands the mistake that he has made. He straightens up and pulls his tunic down, still erect and unbowed. Yet his face is already bleeding, and his eyes look a little wild from the ferocity of the attack he has just endured. He glances about for his wagon—but the mob has it surrounded. Already, they are unhitching the horses, wheeling the flatbed away. The women and girls moving out in the street to hiss and scream at him.

“Butcher! Killer!”

“How dare you come back here
—how dare you!
”

“After you killed that little girl!”

He should have just run then. He should have turned, and run as fast as he could back downtown, and maybe he would have made it to a station house or an army patrol before they could catch him. He should have just turned and run, at least he would have had a fighting chance.

Instead, with great dignity, O'Brien turns on his heel and strides across the street, into Von Briesen's drugstore there. Incredibly, he stands inside at the counter, getting some iodine from the proprietor.
Thinking, maybe, that his only hope is to face them down now?
We can see Von Briesen, his friend, talking to him, helping him to paint his cuts but all the while glancing fitfully back out at the mob gathering in the street.

“He must leave here. He must go at once,” Father Knapp is telling me.

But Colonel O'Brien continues to stand in front of the counter, his sword sheathed, as if oblivious to it all.

“Murderer!”

“A little girl, no less! An' right on ‘er own street—”

It is almost inevitable then, a chunk of rock goes sailing through Von Briesen's window. There is another stone, then another, knocking his displays to pieces.

O'Brien flinches, as if startled. Now, at last, he puts down the little stick and the bloodied rag he had been applying to his face. He
draws his sword and a revolver, and walks out of the shop, straight at the mob.

How brave you are! How little good it will do you here.
Another man might have tried to talk his way out of it—to reason with the mob or claim he is not really who they think he is. But O'Brien says nothing, only advancing upon them. And when he moves out onto the sidewalk, they actually begin to give way, while still spewing their hatred.

“Killer!
Bloody killer!
”

Unbeknownst to O'Brien, one of them has gotten into the drugstore now, from a door on the other side. He moves stealthily up behind him, through the shop—and I see, to my horror, that it is that creature from the park. The killer.
Still alive,
somehow, even after the battle in the street, when he stood and beckoned at the soldiers to shoot him.

Now he carries the huge clump of wood with the words
no draft!
scrawled on them in one hand, holding it as lightly as a stick. He moves with startling speed through the store, too fast even for Von Briesen, the large, placid German shopkeeper, to see him and shout a warning in time. Not too fast for Father Knapp, who tries to at least alert O'Brien.

“Watch him there!
There, behind ya, son!
”

But it makes no difference. O'Brien hesitates but does not turn, afraid no doubt that this is some crude street trick. He only starts to look around when he hears the drugstore door open, and by then he is too late. The creature from the park is already bringing his block of wood down, hard, on his head.

It should be a crushing blow, a killing blow. But O'Brien is a strong man, and somehow he stops himself even from falling all the way over, only drops his pistol on the sidewalk. He leans down to get it—and the creature hits him again with the lump of wood, knocking him senseless this time.

“Oh, God!” Father Knapp repeats his lament, one long wail directed futilely to me. “Oh, God, you know what is going to happen now!”

“Yes—”

He wades into the mob even as it begins to encircle O'Brien. Waving his hands in front of them, speaking at the top of his voice, as if trying to wake a somnambulist.

“You must stop! As your pastor I forbid it!
For the love of God!
”

They only pick up the priest and move him bodily away, solid as he is—as firmly but gently as one might move a toddling infant out of danger. He tries to push his way back in to O'Brien, but some of the bigger louts only shove him on out again, until at last he turns to me, red-faced and openmouthed in his desperation.

“We must
help
him. We must do something to help him!”

“Yes, Father,” I tell him, gripping the gun in my coat pocket that Acton gave me at police headquarters.
Armed again—but what a deception it is.
The six shots in the revolver might cut us through to O'Brien, but he is still lying on the ground, unconscious, and what would we do with him then?

I clutch the revolver, thinking, somehow, that maybe it will not be so bad. O'Brien is one of
them,
after all, an Irishman and a Roman Catholic. I can see the crucifix around his neck when they tear open his tunic. The little silver man, spread out upon the cross.
After all, his skin is white—

But the whole block must be out by now, and many other blocks as well. The women, in particular, cursing and kicking at him. More of them looking simply bemused, like a teenage girl I notice, gawky and freckled, and big-eared. Caught halfway between her adolescence and womanhood, still wearing an apron tied around her waist. Her mouth is slanted open in wonder, as if she is seeing the circus elephant for the first time. As the both of us look on, they tie a rope around his arms and legs, and drag him up and down the street, his head bumping helplessly along the uneven paving stones—

“We must help him! We can't just stand an' watch!”

Father Knapp clutches at my coat, nearly knocking me over. His renewed cries jolting me back into action. I wrestle him a few more feet away from the crowd, where I hope they cannot hear us—though already I can see several gang
b'hoys
looking in our direction.

“There is nothing we can do here, not by ourselves!” I hiss at him, trying to make the man see sense.
Trying to ignore the revolver in my coat.
“We have to go look for help, the both of us. You start for the west, I'll make my way downtown, try to find any cops or soldiers you can—”

He sees the sense of my plan, nods and sets out at once. I do as well, running down the streets toward the south. Wondering if I should return to this accursed block at all—if I should not simply make my way back down to Maddy's, hide myself away in her bedroom there—

No, I must find help.
Here is something for me to do, at last, something real, and at first I am even exhilarated. Scurrying around to the nearest precinct houses I know of. Running toward the sound of any fighting or looting, thinking that I am sure to find some troops, or Carpenter's Metropolitans there.

But there is nothing. Most of the station houses I take myself to are on fire, or already burned to a crisp. The only two I find that are still intact are manned by the usual skeleton crew of a couple police sergeants, with orders to hold for as long as they can. They could not help me anyway—silently standing aside to let me see the houseful of refugees behind them, the frightened, brown faces of women and children, peering out at the smoking streets.

I even go back to my own block, to Gramercy Park, around its pristine, fenced-in square. Looking for Strong's squad of German vigilantes, hoping to convince them to save O'Brien. They refuse, too—afraid to leave the park even for a few minutes, afraid their intervention will bring the mob over in force.

They may well be right; I can hardly blame them. I stand on the sidewalk for a moment, staring up at my own home, before I have to scurry off again. Everything here still untouched, as quiet as the grave, despite all the smoke and the shouting coming from the greater City all around us. Wondering what it would be like, to have Maddy there, in the silent house, to be in there with her.

Then I must go on. But the fighting, Carpenter's flying squad, and the troops, are always somewhere else. I consider trying to make my way down to the headquarters on Mulberry Street again, but it is too far. Surely O'Brien will be dead by the time I can make it there and back, and I do not know if they even have any men to spare.

At last I make my way back up to Murray's Hill, hoping that somehow it may now be possible to steal him away—that the crowd has grown tired or ashamed of their sport, as they did with Superintendent Kennedy.

But they have done no such thing. Instead they have tortured him throughout the afternoon. There are bloody smears now on the paving stones from where they have dragged him, and they have broken all his teeth, flattened his nose and cheeks by dropping stones and brick on him.

Now they push small wads of paper into his hair and under his nails, and set them on fire. After that the women begin to do their work
on him—kneeling around him in the street, grinning fiercely at one another. They slice through his uniform pants, into the pale, white skin beneath. Pouring in the oil when they make a deep enough cut.

Worst of all, he is conscious again. Awakening to the nightmare, trussed and tied helplessly before them. But he will not cry out, will not scream or beg for mercy—at least not before they set the oil on fire. And even when he does, then, it is only a low, rasping, grudging sound, all the more wrenching for being barely human anymore.

It brings him no respite. The women hovering over him only kick and spit at him all the harder. Still screaming their insults and justifications:

“You killer! You damned killer! How could you come back here an' show your face—”

“That's what you get for killin' Ellen Kirk!”

“That's what you get for killin' babies!”

They will not let anyone so much as move him. Von Briesen, his friend the druggist, tries to bring him a cup of water. Lowering his sweating, white-shirted, German bulk down over the pavement—“
Please—please, just a little water—
”

They snatch the cup from his hand, dash it through his already fractured shop window.

“Did Ellen Kirk get a glass of water? Did she, then, before they killed her?”

They demolish what remains of the German's store. Tearing down his shingle and looting the change drawer. Smashing the lovely apothecary bottles behind his counter, the tonics and balms in all their amber and rusty hues. Von Briesen gives a sorrowful little shrug, walks prudently away down the street.

The teenage girl I spotted earlier begins to scream when they castrate him. She was probably a domestic, I thought—a scullery maid, or assistant cook. She edged her way into the women's cutting circle, kneeling down in the street with the rest of them, smiling shyly about herself. Someone pressed a knife into her palm and she began to slice through the blue wool leg of O'Brien's uniform, as diligent and industrious as if she were peeling her mistress's potatoes.