William Kennedy - Quinn's Book

I stepped back into the sunlight and saw that Toddy, the wagon, the recruiter, and his crowd were all gone. I followed the lane and fell in line soon enough behind the wagon, the recruiter now seated and holding the reins but still hailing all gawkers with his spiel: “Hullo and listen to us now. . look here on the corpse of Toddy Ryan. . killed for being Irish. . clubs for all at the foot of Lumber Street. . we’ll show them who we are. . we’ll send them to blazes. .”

We passed Patroon Street, several dozen of us now in the growing parade with Toddy’s wagon, and we moved north on Broadway in the warming sunlight of the morning. I could see the crowd of men looming ahead of us, twice as large as the group I’d seen on the hill. These were young men, mostly hatless and in shirtsleeves, vibrant in their gestures, anticipating the greater vibrancy of battle. A dozen or two smaller boys were fighting mock duels with the promised clubs that were being handed out from a wagon. I knew a few of the men: Walter White and Petey Carey from Van Woert Street; Midge McTigue, who had worked at the lumberyard with my father. I guessed that my father would have been with these men had he been alive. I could not find Joey Ryan but I saw Emmett, still unshaven, probably sleepless, and looking gravely upset as he grabbed two men by their shirts. I heard his words: “It’s madness to fight uphill. . madness to fight at all this way.”

“Too late for that jabber, Emmett,” one man said, knocking Emmett’s hand from his shirt.

Emmett pushed through to the head of the crowd to yell to them all, “Don’t do this, men. . we’ll have a dozen corpses among us before the day is out. .”

One hoarse voice called out, “By the Christ, let’s get on with it,” and at that the men, numbering sixty at least, strode forward up Lumber Street, some of them pocketing stones as they went. And then came the rap of the clubs on the cobblestones in steady tattoo: rap, step, rap, step, rap, step, rap — this in march cadence, which the men’s feet found compatible; and they moved to it. Emmett saw me, came to me, grabbed my arm.

“You’re not in this, boy. I say you’re not.”

“I was looking for Joey Ryan. He’s out to get Alfie Palmer.”

“That puny little thing after Alfie?”

“He wants to cut his head off.”

Emmett shook his head. “Madness everywhere,” he said. Then he looked at the men moving up the hill. “I’ve got to get with them.”

“Are you going to fight, Emmett?”

“Not if I can help it. But maybe I can do some good.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No.”

“I want to see it.”

“Then see it, but stay on the sides.”

I had no animosity toward Alfie Palmer, whom I didn’t know; nor did I feel it my responsibility to champion the cause of Toddy Ryan beyond keeping track of Joey. I walked with Emmett and we caught up with the men as they turned a corner. Spectators joined us: old men, young men, women and children — all on the run from other streets as word of the battle spread; and we moved like a Roman parade, marching the gladiators to the arena. The men kept themselves a tight body as they marched, but when they sighted the enemy waiting two blocks up Colonie Street hill, some behind barricades, their cries went up: “Kill the bastards. . go now. . get ’em,” and they broke ranks and with wordless screams ran forward.

The Ryans, doing themselves no favor running uphill, ran into a hail of stones and paving blocks. They returned them in kind, but the Palmers, galloping downhill with the help of gravity and raised clubs, flung their bodies at the uphillers and felled sixteen into varying states of unconsciousness, losing only half a dozen of their own number in that opening charge. The smack of fists on flesh, the whap of club on skull collided with the curses and whoops of the warriors. Iron bars came into use, though the dominant fashion was the club, either of these tools cumbersome in close combat and some quickly discarded so as to allow fighting with fists and teeth, the battlers rolling and tussling into the proper position to gouge an eye, chew an ear. The battle opened itself and tumbled down new streets and into the pasture that sloped toward Van Woert Street, the growing mob of spectators ringing the fighters, moving with the most vicious, cheering them on to ever grander gouging and bashing.

There exists in the spectacle of a mass of men in fistic battle a love of punishment and pain, a need to be smashed in the mouth by life or else risk losing sight of what is necessary to survival. In the war I would see much worse, but I’d seen nothing before to equal the violence of this day: the ripped shirts, the bloody faces, the noses and ears bitten half off, the torn and bloody fists with their naked bones, men spitting out teeth, men unable to stand, one man shot but the pistol never found, a dozen men stabbed, two dozen with fractured heads, and some to die of these things and be buried in secret, one of the Palmers stabbed in both arms and never the same after. I saw Emmett remove from the fray the man who did that stabbing, a Ryan, but one not to Emmett’s liking, and so he punched him, but once, on the side of the head, and the man fell like ten pounds of liver. Emmett took the man’s dirk from his hand and rolled him down the hill.

Women ministered to fallen battlers, blotting their wounds, pulling them to safer turf. I spied a man whose face was the color of a ripe tomato, a scorch in full bloom, and I wondered, is this Alfie Palmer? The raw look of him just might have come from a bath in boiling tea. (How had the Ryans boiled their tea in that closed shack? I saw no chimney, nor any opening for one. Did they live amid smoke?) Such was Palmer’s face (and it was his) that it could not have heretofore eluded me, and I concluded he was a latecomer to the battle. But that face was known, and when it appeared, it magnetically convened the Ryan lust for vengeance, Alfie quickly ringed by more men than could possibly reach him with club or fist. He knocked down two Ryans with his club before he went under: under by choice, I must now think, for what reasons other than guilt, or suicidal madness, could have compelled him to enter this battlefield of hate as a willful target?

He went down and felt the rain of kicks by Ryan brogans until a group of Palmers moved in for the rescue. But rescue the principal Palmer of the day they could not; for while other Ryans beat the Palmers back, a man all in Albany would come to recognize from this instant forward as Horse Houlihan, a lumber handler of immense size and girth, picked up the inert Alfie and, with great strength and unerring method, broke both his arms and both his legs, cracking each arm over bent knee, stepping on each leg and then snapping it upward, the reverse of its natural flex. The pain of the first break revived Alfie into a scream, but he then lapsed back into his coma and accepted the other fractures without a whimper.

The battle moved in splintered struggles away from the useless Alfie, the last of his reduction being the gob of spit Horse Houlihan loosed on him. And there he lay, a man of spoiled body and soul, a testament to what? To an incomplete understanding of the forces that had been unleashed through his loss of job and death of son; of even less comprehension now of what he himself had released with his random vengeance on the tragic Toddy.

Madness was insufficient designation for what had come of it, for what arose among the battlers was not pathology but something more conscious of itself: the final horrific begetting now blossoming in Joey Ryan, who came out of the crowd after the spectators had shifted with the flow. He found himself standing alone, moving slowly forward and then kneeling to perform with stunning malice the final coda of Alfie’s saga: pummeling the near-dead face of his father’s murderer with his slungshot as he shouted “Bastard man, bastard man” over and over, until I pulled him away and was, myself, struck by inadvertence with the weapon, no less painfully for Joey’s lack of intent. My intervention came too late, for the slungshot had created bloody craters on Alfie’s face and permanently blinded his right eye, a total blinding having been Joey’s intention from the moment he espied the inert form.