Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Danny said, “You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you’re born to and the one you build.”

“Two families,” Joe said, eyeing him.

He nodded. “Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there’s another family and that’s the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they’re as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don’t have to look out for you and they don’t have to love you. They choose to.”

“So you and Luther, you chose each other?”

Danny cocked his head. “I was thinking more of me and Nora, but now that you mention it, I guess me and Luther did, too.”

“Two families,” Joe said.

“If you’re lucky.”

Joe thought about that for a bit and the inside of his body felt splashy and ungrounded, as if he might float away.

“Which are we?” Joe said.

“The best kind.” Danny smiled. “We’re both, Joe.”

At home, it got worse. Connor, when he talked, ranted about the anarchists, the Bolsheviks, the Galleanists, and the mud races who constituted their core. Jews financed them, he said, and Slavs and wops did their dirty work. They were riling up the niggers down South and poisoning the minds of the working whites back east. They’d tried to kill his boss, the attorney general of the United States of America, twice . They talked of unionization and rights for the workingman, but what they really wanted was violence on a national scale and despotism. Once turned onto the subject, he couldn’t be turned off, and he’d just about combust when talk turned to the possibility of a police strike.

It was a rumor in the Coughlin home all summer, and even though Danny’s name was never said, Joe knew that he was somehow involved. The Boston Social Club, his father told Connor, was talking to the AFL, to Samuel Gompers about an impending charter. They would be the first policemen in the country with national affiliation to a labor union. They could alter history, his father said and ran a hand over his eyes.

His father aged five years that summer. Ran down. Shadowed pockets grew below his eyes as dark as ink. His colorless hair turned gray.

Joe knew he’d been stripped of some of his power and that the culprit was Commissioner Curtis, a man whose name his father uttered with hopeless venom. He knew that his father seemed weary of fighting and that Danny’s break from the family had hit him far harder than he let on.

The last day of school, Joe returned to the house to find his father and Connor in the kitchen. Connor, just back from Washington, was already well into his cups, the whiskey bottle on the table, the cork lying beside it.

“It’s sedition if they do it.”

“Oh, come on, boy, let’s not be overly dramatic.”

“They’re officers of the law, Dad, the first line of national defense. If they even talk about walking off the job, that’s treason. No different than a platoon that walks away from the field of battle.”

“It’s a little different.” Joe’s father sounded exhausted.

Connor looked up when Joe entered the room and this was usually where such conversation ended, but this time Connor kept going, his eyes loose and dark.

“They should all be arrested. Right now. Just go down to the next BSC meeting and throw a chain around the building.”

“And what? Execute them?” His father’s smile, so rare these days, returned for a moment, but it was thin.

Connor shrugged and poured more whiskey into his glass.

“You’re half serious.” His father noticed Joe now, too, as Joe placed his book sack up on the counter.

“We execute soldiers who walk away from the front,” Connor said.

His father eyed the whiskey bottle but didn’t reach for it. “While I may disagree with the men’s plan of action, they have a legitimate beef. They’re underpaid—”

“So let them go out and get another job.”

“—the state of their quarters is unhygienic to say the least and they’re dangerously overworked.”

“You sympathize with them.”

“I can see their point.”

“They’re not garment workers,” Connor said. “They’re emergency personnel.”

“He’s your brother.”

“Not anymore. He’s a Bolshevik and a traitor.”

“Ah, Jaysus H,” his father said. “You’re talking crazy talk.”

“If Danny is one of the ringleaders of this and they do strike? He deserves whatever’s coming to him.”

He looked over at Joe when he said this and swirled the liquor in his glass and Joe saw contempt and fear and an embittered pride in his brother’s face.

“You got something to say, little tough guy?” Connor took a swig from his glass.

Joe thought about it. He wanted to say something eloquent in defense of Danny. Something memorable. But the words wouldn’t come, so he finally said the ones that did.

“You’re a piece of shit.”

No one moved. It was as if they’d all turned to porcelain, the whole kitchen, too.

Then Connor threw his glass in the sink and charged. Their father got a hand on his chest, but Connor got past him long enough to reach for Joe’s hair and Joe twisted away but fell to the floor and Connor got one kick in before his father pushed him back.

“No,” Connor said. “No! Did you hear what he called me?”

Joe, on the ground, could feel where his brother’s fingers had touched his hair.

Connor pointed over his father’s shoulder at him. “You little puke, he’s got to go to work sometime, and you got to sleep here!”

Joe got up off the floor and stared at his brother’s rage, stared it straight in the face and found himself unimpressed and unafraid.

“You think Danny should be executed?” he said.

His father pointed back at him. “Shut up, Joe.”

“You really think that, Con’?”

“I said shut up!”

“Listen to your father, boy.” Connor was starting to smile.

“Fuck you,” Joe said.

Joe had time to see Connor’s eyes widen, but he never saw his father spin toward him, his father always a man of startling speed, faster than Danny, faster than Con’, and a hell of a lot faster than Joe, because Joe didn’t even have time to lean back before the back of his father’s hand connected with Joe’s mouth and Joe’s feet left the floor. When he landed, his father was already on him, both hands on his shoulders. He hoisted him up from the floor and slammed his back into the wall so that they were face-to-face, Joe’s shoes dangling a good two feet off the floor.

His father’s eyes bulged in their sockets and Joe noticed how red they were. He gritted his teeth and exhaled through his nostrils and a lock of his newly gray hair fell to his forehead. His fingers dug into Joe’s shoulders and he pressed his back into the wall as if he were trying to press him straight through it.

“You say that word in my house? In my house ?”

Joe knew better than to answer.

“In my house?” his father repeated in a high whisper. “I feed you, I clothe you, I send you to a good school, and you talk like that in here? Like you’re from trash?” He slammed his shoulders back into the wall. “Like you’re common?” He loosened his grip just long enough for Joe’s body to slacken and then slammed him into the wall again. “I should cut out your tongue.”

“Dad,” Connor said. “Dad.”

“In your mother’s house?”

“Dad,” Connor said again.

His father cocked his head, eyeballing Joe with those red eyes. He removed one hand from Joe’s shoulder and closed it around his throat.

“Jesus, Dad.”

His father raised him higher, so that Joe had to look down into his red face.