The Law of Dreams (17 page)

NIGHT TRAFFIC BEHIND
the quays was harsher and more
violent than Dublin. Carts rumbled up and down the road, iron wheels grinding and
snapping on the cobblestones. It was snowing lightly. The group was straggling. Some of
the
Ruth
s were having trouble keeping up.

“Not far now,” the navvy said, looking around. “Keep
together. Liverpool's full of thieves.”

Fergus stared down the dark streets they passed.

Another city made of stone.

“There she is.” Stopping at a corner, the navvy was pointing
to a stone building across the road. “Fenwick Street Night Asylum.”

A long line of people had coiled around the building.

“Is it the workhouse?” Fergus asked.

“They give out soup, so what do you care?” The navvy laughed.
He was already walking away. Fergus longed to go with him but didn't have the
strength to keep up, and was afraid the navvy would laugh at him if he tried to. He
crossed the road and joined the queue.

They were all emigrants off the steamers. He could tell from the shawls
and red cloaks women wore, the shapes of men's broken hats.

A soldier in blue uniform stood at the front door admitting people in
groups of four or five. The queue advanced slowly.

He smelled soup each time the door opened. He was
trying not to think of Luke, who was crowding his mind: her voice, her pale eyes, her
bones.

What you wanted must keep you going.

“No talking inside,” the soldier warned, holding open the
door. Once inside the queue moved slowly down a brick passage to a table where a clerk
sat scratching names in a ledger and handing out tickets for soup and a bed.

The scent of soup was intense; he could see the steam of it shining on the
bricks. Hunger wetted his mouth.

Poised with his pen, the clerk did not even look up. “Name? Where
from?”

“Ireland.”

“Whereabouts?”

He hesitated. “Dublin.”

“What ship?”

“Ruth.”

Gas lamps hummed with light. He could smell the steam and the food. He had
never felt so alone.

THE EMIGRANTS
fed at long tables. The great room was
quiet except for crying children and the scrape of spoons. He was allowed to take a lump
of bread from a basket.

The soup was yellow, with scraps of fish. He crumbled the bread into his
bowl, looking about him as he ate. Everyone else was concentrating on their food. Even
the small children were eating vigorously.

Finishing his soup, he suddenly felt clipped with weariness, and rested
his head in his hands. A cramp shot through his belly. When it subsided, he took a
breath, then another cramp shot through.

On the pass he had been ready to die, but not here. He wasn't ready
to die in England full of poison.

The cramps struck hard, crippling him as he staggered from the enormous
eating room.

In the open courtyard, a dozen men and boys squatted on boards over a pit,
relieving themselves. He stepped out of the remains of his trousers and squatted.
Stinging liquid gushed out of him until he thought his heart, soul, liver,
must have liquefied and been voided. He kept hoping there was
nothing left inside, but there was.

My share of blood, he thought, my share of poison. I am dying like all of
them.

No. He wasn't. The cramps were already subsiding, and his head was a
little clearer. After a few minutes he was able to pull up his trousers, hand over his
second ticket to another blue soldier and enter the night asylum where ranks of wooden
boxes were organized on the floor with men asleep inside them. He walked up and down and
stopped when he finally found an empty box. In orange lamplight he could see others
drifting up and down the rows, like men culling through a herd of cattle, or examining
old headstones.

He hated to think of strangers looking at him asleep.

Too tired to keep standing, he finally stepped into the box and lay down,
staring at the ceiling, trying hard to think of nothing, and after a while he slept.

THE GUN FIRED
and the smoke was seeded with bits of iron
that stung his face and eyelids. It fired once more, and this time a slug spinning came
at him, its tip sharply pointed, like a fish spear.

He sat up, violently awake, heart pounding, heat spreading over his legs.
An old man coming up the aisle between the pallets was ringing a hand bell with a kind
of joy, and men were swarming like ticks from their sleeping boxes.

“Out and out, you farthings, out and out with you! Come, you poor
Michaels, shake the leg!”

Herded outside, they spilled into the wet, shiny road. It was night still.
His breath steamed. Women and girls flowed from another door, and the crowd began
sorting into families that started off into the complex darkness until there was no one
left except a few white-faced women suckling babies on the asylum steps.

A plan was needed. Without the spine of a plan he knew he could not
withstand the city, it would dissolve him, and he started to walk, aiming for the river,
passing pungent lumps of bodies asleep in doorways.

He would find the steamers disembarking cattle and hire on for a drover.
Walk those cattle into the mountains of England. Whistling and calls; driving them easy,
as he knew how. He had the voice for cattle. He grasped their moods; he could feel the
weather they could feel.

Work the cattle trade, save. Buy greased hobnail
boots, a straw hat — and then, perhaps, a pony. Or a good red mare, a real hunter:
a bounder with thick cannon bones, long back, and a spring to her. A sleek pistol tucked
in the welt of your saddle. Gun down any marauders wishing to ruin you.

The world's a rim, a wheel, enclosing everything. A wheel
don't look back at what is crushed.

STREETS AND
squares of Liverpool were organized,
fantastic monsters. Building after building, corners, edges and strict angles — he
could never have imagined anything so sharply arranged. The limited sky smoldered and
slowly lit, providing some depth to side streets of houses shouldered together. Traffic
began to thicken.

Liverpool men walked briskly, wore boots and canvas aprons. Runners pushed
barrows piled with sheepskin, coal, and pig carcasses. Near the river, the smells of
brine and tar mixed with the scents of burning coal and horses. Everything moved quickly
here — pairs of boys trotted along bearing heavy timbers on their shoulders. Men
carrying grapple hooks, swinging buckets of nails.

You could smell the ferocity on the street.

WHAT IS
Liverpool? A city? A world?

He stopped underneath a carving of a horse hanging on wires above the door
of a beer shop. The smell of smoke and meat leaked out from inside and his mouth was wet
with hunger, but he felt uncertain. Coinage was fraught. He wasn't certain he knew
the ritual of exchanges.

Wary of Liverpool men, massive and unusual. They might pitch him out. Set
him a beating.

However, hard money had some power. He remembered his mother kissing each
coin on market day.

Life burns hot, Fergus.

Trying to make up his mind, he hopped restlessly from one foot to another,
one coin in each fist. The door opened and pack of thick-shouldered men came out, and he
caught a tantalizing whiff of the smoky, meaty atmosphere within.

You could stand outside, bootless and chewing fear like a baby; or take
the bold plunge. Offer a coin for a feed and see if they would like it.

The world, latent; a gun loaded with chance and mistakes.

The door swung open once more and two enormous men came out, with an odor
of hot blood and juice, almost sickening. Ignoring him, they paused to light their
pipes, then walked off on their crisp boot heels.

Honor is held by them in boots.

Seizing the door, he pulled it open and threw himself inside.

THE AIR
was gray. Liverpool men sat cutting into fuming
hunks of meat. The barman, drawing beer, glared at him.

Fear hummed in his blood but he forced himself to return the man's
stare.

Luke, make me hard.

“Away with you Mike! No beggars here!” the barman growled.

Fergus held up one of his coins.

“What's that, Irish brass?”

He flinched but kept holding up the shilling until the barman reached out
and grabbed it, flipped it, caught it — and dropped it in the pocket of his
apron.

“Sit down, you awful savage.”

He found space on a bench and sat, ashamed of his bare feet among
Liverpool men so preoccupied with their fabulous, smoky eating they hardly spoke among
themselves. Men glanced at him then went back to their rations — no one seemed to
care who he was.

His beer had a sweet smell, when the barman put it in front of him, like a
flower in the sun. The beefsteak had a round of bone in its eye and a rind of charred
fat. Cutting the meat into fragments, lifting each delicious piece on the point of his
knife, he chewed slowly.

He worried they were watching him but they weren't.

How to ignore the pressure of the rough world?

By the time he had cleaned his plate, there were only two other customers
left in the shop — old brown men lying on benches, hats over their faces, snoring.
He chewed the last strand of fat and began to soak bread morsels in
juice. The barman behind the bar stood reading a newspaper, eating a dish of cooked
eggs.

Closing his eyes, he saw Luke propped against the storehouse wall, blood
leaking on the stones.

You carry everything inside. Where? In the head. If you could knock it
out, would you? If you could scour the brain, would you? Yes. Of course.

Swallowing the last dregs of the beer, he rose, grabbed the disc of bone,
and rushed out into the day's smashing brightness.

THE FIRST
cattle dealer to whom he applied glared and
said, “No, I don't require no more hands, no.”

Other dealers on the quays all shook their heads.

“Don't need you, Mike.”

Some of them cracking little whips, impatiently.

“No.”

“No!”

“This herd is only going across the river, Mike.”

He walked the dockland with senses sharply tuned, like a dog unearthing a
badger. Sky over the river, blue as clay. At Clarence Dock a steamer was splashing in,
and a runner informed him she was
Merrion
out of Newry — wherever that
was. Her deck jammed with red cattle. He watched deckhands throwing lines and sodden
passengers heaving baggage ashore then leaping down onto the quay where runners
descended on them like a horde of wasps.

He approached dealer after dealer, asking for work. Cattle dealers wore
sidewhiskers, gaudy pantaloons red-and-white striped, plush waistcoats, and cravats.
Their jackets were trimmed with ribbons, and their horse boots shone with grease. They
puffed their pipes and looked at him steady.

No.

No.

Not now, Patrick.

Don't need you.

No.

Dockland stretched forever along the Mersey. Beggars called out in Irish,
soft voices crushed under iron-rimmed dray wheels. Each dock held a basin crowded with
ships, surrounded by quays and warehouses. Looking up, he watched ship riggers at work
in forests of masts, spars, and rigging. The riggers looked like black beetles, working
so high.

Liverpool was a hard place, a stone place; it could grind you.

Embrace of loneliness shall kill you in the end.

Walking up the wide road behind the dockland, afraid of being so afraid.
Trying to keep your terror compact and hidden.

AT MIDDAY GUNS CRACKED
and bells banged all up and down
the river. Hundreds of sailors, dockers, and riggers poured off ships and quays into a
warren of alleys behind the dockland, lined with eating houses, roast beef stalls, and
beer shops.

He was standing in the Vauxhall road with eyes closed, feeling the stream
of hungry men pour past him, feeling invisible, when he sensed the vibration sliding
through the streets like a piece of changing weather. He opened his eyes and saw that
horses and carts were being pulled to the side to clear the way for men who were
marching up the road following a drum.

He stood next to a cart horse with his hand on the animal's warm
flank, watching the red-bearded giant who walked at the head of the parade bearing a
great drum, followed by rank after rank of men carrying picks and spades sloped at their
shoulders.

“Who are they?” he asked the carter.

“Scotch navvies, off the railway works. Mr. Brassey's
contract.”

“Where do they march?”

“Looking for a randy, I suppose.”

“What's that?”

“A fight.”

“Fighting who?”

“You Irish fellows, I should think.”

The red giant thumped his drum with a pair of
tasseled sticks, and the boom of it shook the air; it stirred you, made you feel
excited, vulnerable, and weak. The drummer was flanked by six guardsmen carrying pick
handles.

It was moving to see them, a proud, disciplined army such as Luke had
never dreamed of. Pipers were playing in the ranks, the wild bleats skirling up and down
the Vauxhall.

As the drummer and guards passed, a figure broke from the crowd of
onlookers opposite Fergus and dashed out into the road.

It was the navvy from
Ruth
lunging at the drum with a knife in
his hand, slashing the taut white skin and ripping it open.

Suddenly onlookers — men and women — were taking stones from
their pockets, pulling out clubs from underneath their jackets, shawls, and cloaks.

The cart horse whinnied. He stroked the animal's warm neck, wishing
it were possible to live inside your head, and not out in the world, so surprising and
ruinous.