A Moment in the Sun (78 page)

Halecki steps past pushing a train of carts full of tankage that will be dried and sold for fertilizer. They don’t waste a thing, P. White’s Sons, and the next passel of horses bound for the City will come up grazing on grass grown on their grandaddy’s bones. Some of the horses come in you can tell they broke a leg or got hit by another carriage, but mostly they are old and gray-muzzled and just been worked out. Jubal hooks carcasses and pops horseshoes till one of the Irish who do errands, little Darby, runs up to say there is a load coming in.

Jubal is the only one suppose to come off the line. It is chilly, his breath showing white and the winter wind blowing strong when he steps out of the building, blowing black smoke from the huge brick chimney over to Rockaway and lifting some of the smell away with it. It is not so bad as he worried, kind of a old-coffee thickness in the air that never goes away, and he is used to it by now. A steam tug pushes a scow piled with carcasses across Dead Horse Bay to the pier, the dark hides nearly hidden by a blanket of feeding gulls. Most every carcass Jubal handles is missing at least one eye and he’s come to hate the birds.

No telling how they bring the horses out when the river finally ices over.

Smitty and Pops are waiting with their wagons by the wharf crane, both with a blinkered four-in-hand team. Uncle Wicklow taught him to handle a big team like that when he was in livery for Mr. Sprunt, and once Jubal got to work six mules rolling a house from Queen Street to Market. A mule won’t let you kill him with work, but horses—these ones coming in on the scow probly just got pushed past what they could do, too heavy, too steep, too fast. Driver got to make up for the sense that a horse don’t have, and Jubal has always had a feel for them. Once when they were little and times was hard Mama bought some horsemeat from Honniker and cooked it in a stew. Mama could make a sump-digger’s boot taste good, but Jubal couldn’t touch a bite and Royal laughed at him and ate the whole mess.

“Jubal think he know who this stew is,” he said. “Know the name of every horse in town.”

The gulls stir some when the scow bangs against the pilings and Jubal hops down to tie her up. He kicks at one of the birds that stays too close when he climbs onto the pile of carcasses.

“Got room for you in that renderin tank.”

Hruba who operates the crane sends the tackle down and Jubal gets busy, muscling the first cold body around with his gaff while old Inkspot fixes lines in place and sets the hardware. Inkspot is drunk whenever he’s not working but still moves quick, hopping around the jumble of bodies and legs like a flea, tapping where he wants Jubal to lift, trussing the animal to be lifted. He sits back on the rump of a Cleveland bay and jerks his thumb up at Hruba.

“You got im!”

Half the gulls are still on the pile and half are flapping in the air, looking for an opening. The winch chain rattles till it goes taut and the hooked horse is hoisted straight up, eyeless head flopping to one side, then swung over Smitty’s wagon bed and cranked down. Smitty got his whole team in feedbags for the loading—it could be sacks of concrete coming down for all they know. Some horses will shy at a corpse, but they can be trained around it. Jubal drove Mr. Rivers the undertaker’s matched black Tennessee Walkers for a spell, wearing a top hat that was a mite too big for him, and never had to use an overchuck on them, the horses raising their heads up proud the minute they saw the hearse rolled out. Except for the Phenix fire pumper, that was the finest team in Wilmington, stepping high, pulling even, standing tall. Dignified.

Jubal knows how old a horse is from twenty paces, can feel its legs and tell you is it a lead or a swing or a wheelhorse, can tell you how it’s been hitched and how much it can pull, can riff his fingers in the coat and let you know what kind of feed it’s lacking. But these ones don’t tell much of a story, just dead weight to gaff till old Inky has got the lines fixed and then you move on to the next. Uncle Wick owns a little patch out on the way to Winnabow and sometimes he move an old horse off a team and onto a single-pull and then one day when it isn’t good for even that he put it out on that patch, lets it feed and sleep all day and go rheumy-eyed and ski-footed. Might be four or five of them old horses out there at any time that Uncle say weren’t to be rode.

“That hoss done carry his share of the world,” he would say if Jubal or Royal would ask could they climb up. “Leave him rest now.”

Smitty’s wagon fills and he pulls the feed bags off and puts the bits back in and clucks the team back toward the rendering plant, steam showing out their noses, a few gulls resettling on top. Smitty is good, can dock that rig backward into the loading slot first try every time. Used to run them eight-up for a moving company, he says, till it was bought by a bigger company that wanted all white horses and all white drivers.

Jubal gaffs a broke-legged pony and rolls it back for Inkspot. The pony has been shot in the head and has a pinto hide, which the skinners always put away special. Be on somebody’s easy chair in no time. Jubal looks over to Brooklyn while the old man kneels by the pony with lines in hand. It is part of Greater New York now, part of the City. Word is that the colored man’s future is up here, even if won’t nobody look you straight in the eye.

“You just don’t stop movin, is what,” old Inkspot told him the first night in the room they share, his breath sharp with whiskey. “You stop movin, black or white, you gets throwed in the
pot
.”

How many horses there must be over there, for this many to come in dead every day? Every one of them horses need caring for, feeding, somebody who know how to work them. It only makes sense. This the place for me, Jubal thinks as the pony is hoisted and swings upside down next to him for a moment. I just got in on the wrong end of it.

With a piano she could give lessons. Or even just to play for Mother and Father at night. Jessie has read the bulletins posted at the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera and at the Carnegie Hall. It is possible that these instructors don’t have a piano in their homes, but they have positions that give them access to one, or money to rent a music room. In this city nothing happens until money passes hands.

Even if they could afford it, of course, a piano is an impossibility in their two crowded rooms. Walls would need to be moved and a crane employed to bring one in, the lopsided stairs too narrow, too weak to bear the weight. The only music she hears now is from the pianola at the corner saloon, drifting up from the street till halfway through the night. Some of the songs are lively but the machine lacks at least a quarter of the notes and depends on the stamina and interest of whoever is pumping the pedals, and the saloon keeper insists on having his rolls played in the same order every night. If the neighborhood is being graced with
Hello, Mah Baby
it is a quarter past seven.

Jessie has passed the women before, standing in the cold under the elevated tracks on Ninth just north of Paddy’s Market, arms folded, chatting in small groups, waiting to be picked up. At first, unsure of their business on the street, she walked by pretending they weren’t there, but eventually began to nod politely and respond to their questions and listen to their suggestions. She has solicited as far south as Park Row and as far north as 80th Street, venturing all the way to the East River once to see about a position in a laundry. She has learned that the shops on the Ladies’ Mile do not hire colored girls to meet the public, and that most of the small manufacturing concerns employ workers who speak the same language as the floor managers. She has learned to hide rather than reveal her education when seeking a position as a domestic, and she has learned, in her two torturous half-days of employment, that she can neither cook nor sew. She has been left more than once outside an employment-agency door while dozens of white women were ushered past her and discovered how long a lady can sit alone resting her legs at a park bench before attracting unwelcome attention. It is not more than a few minutes.

“Is there a line for me to put myself at the end of?” she asks Alberta, the friendliest of the colored girls, who says she is from Charleston.

“Naw, honey, you just stan out here like the rest of us. If they like what they see they ask you over, then you make a deal and get in.”

“Sometimes they remember if they had you before,” says her friend Clarice. “Sometimes they want to look at your hands or hear you say your name or there’s a uniform you got to fit into.”

There is Alberta and Clarice and Queen, who is big and looks angrily at everyone, then an Irish woman called Wee Kate who doesn’t stop talking and four other Irish girls who listen to her and then two dark-haired girls who speak something Jessie doesn’t recognize, all of them standing in the dirty slush beneath the rattling trolleys waiting for someone to pick them up.

“They’ve been hiring to cover baseballs across the river,” says Wee Kate. “Hand stitching. It pays by the piece, but an able girl can do well for herself.”

“Ye’ve done it?” asks Sorcha, one of her listeners.

Wee Kate looks insulted. “Let them transport me to New Jersey? Of course not.”

“Then what does it have to do with us?”

“Only that there’s opportunities available, is all. Ye only have to put yerself forward.”

A white man with a stubble of beard rattles up in an old omnibus that has seen better days. There are five women already inside, staring out the windows at them.

“I need three more,” he says, and Jessie is left standing, the others all rushing forward. Two of the Irish girls climb on first and Wee Kate has a foot on the rung before Queen shoulders her out of the way and falls heavily into the final seat.

“That’s three,” she calls and the unshaven man, who has not turned to watch them, flicks his reins and the omnibus jerks away.

“Fecking black whoor,” grumbles Wee Kate, watching the vehicle rattle south toward the Market. “I’ll deal with her tomorrow.”

Jessie feels short of breath though she hasn’t moved from the spot.

“They didn’t ask what the pay was,” she says.

Alberta shrugs. “The sooner in the day you get started the more you can make.”

“Is it safe?”

“There were three of them, and more in the bus.”

“But if you’re alone—”

“Some girls do,” says Alberta. “Not me.”

Jessie is surprised that no one passing turns to stare at them. They have the snow banks to navigate, of course, and the wind cutting between the tall buildings, but still—if there is a place in Wilmington where women congregate and offer their services she does not know where it is. The two foreign girls are taken after a long conversation with a man who speaks their language and then the remaining six of them wait for what seems like hours. Wagons full of ice and meat and fish and fodder for horses pass by them and the trolleys rumble overhead and an Italian man pushing a cart goes by singing praises to his melons and uniformed servants of various races hurry to and from the Market and once a policeman looks them over but does not say hello.

“It’s the Jews ye have to look out for,” says Wee Kate when she has gotten over her tussle with Queen. “They’ll try to cheat ye out of it every time. And very free with their hands, if ye know what I’m sayin. They can’t help themselves in the presence of a Christian girl, it’s a well-known fact. And it’s them that runs the whole city.”

“And I thought it was the lads at Tammany,” says Sorcha, raising her eyes in an exaggerated way. “Croker and that lot.”

“They’re merely the custodians,” corrects Wee Kate. “It’s your Jews, the bankers and financiers and such, that own the whole shebang.”

The Jews that Jessie has seen so far in the city don’t seem to have much. Mrs. Kastner, who lives below them with her half-crippled son who sits mooning on the stoop, twists colored cloth and wire into flowers from early morning until she blows the candles out at night. A boy who wears the black hat and curls next to his ears comes every morning to take what is finished and bring her more material.

There must be different Jews.

“I was a waiter girl for a time,” says Wee Kate. “At Auchenpaugh’s Beer Garden. Now your Dutchman is tight with the gratuities until he’s poured a couple down his gullet, and then he’s as generous as the next fella. I could carry six steins of lager in each of me hands,” she says, holding her skinny arms out wide and making fists. “More than once I’ve navigated the floor with every Fritz on the East Side crowdin the place, and never spilt a drop. ‘Katie,’ they’d say to me when they was feelin no pain and waxin sentymental, ‘yer a drinkin man’s angel.’ ”

“How come you quit?”

Wee Kate raises her chin at Clarice, looking offended. “I didn’t
quit
at all. Auchenpaugh comes in one day, cocky as a magpie on a pump handle, and declares that from now on we’re to wear this get-up as a unyform—” she indicates with the side of her hand, “—down to here and up to there. A decent woman wouldn’t be caught dead in it. ‘Tis only the traditional costume in the village that I hail from,’ says Auchenpaugh. So I says, ‘Then, traditionally, yer women is whoors.’ ”

Sorcha keeps her eyes wide. “And he took offense, did he?”

“Thick heads and thin skins, if ye ask me. I don’t have a word of the German, and it’s a lucky thing too from the tone of what he was sputterin. Lost his best waiter girl that very night.”

“So the skirt was small, ye say?” Sorcha winks at the other women.

“Not enough to keep a field mouse warm. It’s all showgirls there now, the ones as can’t get on to wiggle their fannies at the Casino Roof. Arms like pipe cleaners that can barely lift an honest mug of ale, much less six in each hand. Strumpets, is all, and if that’s what the Dutchmen want I’m well rid of em.”

Wee Kate goes on to tell of her trials in a hotel kitchen and sewing undergarments and assembling cardboard boxes and pretending she was an experienced typewriter girl.

“They had me believe I was just to copy what was already there on the page, not to read it and make corrections,” she complains. “It’s been me own Stations of the Cross. An honest girl has nowhere to turn.”