Alexander C. Irvine (3 page)

For my part, thought Riley Steen as he guided his wagon into a darkened warehouse, I am going to do my damned level best to keep luck out of it.

A
frigid gust
brought Archie up short as he rounded the corner onto Roosevelt. He hunched deeper into his upturned collar and shoved his hands deeper into the torn-out pockets of his tattered greatcoat, but he could escape neither the wind nor the sick embarrassed shame that crept along his skin like a fever. Udo would come through for him if he could, Archie didn’t doubt that. He knew James Gordon Bennett, and could probably get Archie on at the
Herald.
The real problem was whether, with or without Udo’s help, Archie would have anything left of his self-respect by the time the first of the year came around. This was all supposed to be different, he thought. My in-laws were supposed to think highly of my prospects, my neighborhood was not supposed to turn into a slum, my wife wasn’t supposed to find a church whose leader believes we have to bathe on Tuesdays during the winter. Nevertheless, all of that had happened, and Archie hadn’t held down steady work, and he hadn’t started a business, and his wife and little girl were living in a slum.

God, it was easy to loathe oneself after drinking with a prosperous German like Udo. Archie shook his head ruefully.
Your last
three
dollars and you’re out drinking.
But that sort of guilt was cheap and easy to come by. It was also ultimately meaningless; if he wasn’t able to pay the rent come January, the twenty cents he’d spent tonight would make very little difference.

What would make a difference tonight—or tomorrow, since it was after rwelve and the only shops open were groceries—was a little gift. Something unexpected. Candy canes would be good, or a little top for Jane and perhaps a book for Helen. Three dollars would cover it easily, and there was plenty of day work to be had with Yuletide just around the corner.

A little something to say things will get better, Archie thought, and I love you, and even if you want to bathe our daughter when the cold would freeze the balls off a wooden Indian because crazy William Miller says the world’s going to end in 1843, I look forward to rowing across Lake Champlain with you when we’re seventy.

Ahead, through the blowing snow and skipping bits of rubbish, he could see the broad intersection where Chatham Street widened and split into East Broadway and the Bowery. Almost home, he thought. Home to a warm wife and a sleeping child and never mind the filth and the looming rent and the who-knows-how-many neighbors coughing and screaming at each other all night. Udo would help him out. Bennett would give in, he was expanding after all, and Archie had schooling. There would be a job on the
Herald
for him. He’d start as a pressman perhaps, show Bennett he had a willingness to work, then start asking after assignments. It would all lead to a real house, around Madison Square would be perfect. Room to breathe and no stink of urine and disease choking them on their doorstep.

The clattering din of horses and wagons at full gallop reached Archie as he stepped out onto Chatham. To his left a fire wagon loaded with a dozen men sped south, disappearing down Pearl Srreet. Looking over the tops of the buildings lining the broad avenue, he saw the hungry glow of fire, a huge one from the look of it, some distance to the south. A ship off the Battery, perhaps? He heard one of the new steam fire engines, its bell ringing and crew shouting, farther down toward City Hall, where Broadway and Chatham angled together. The fire had to be near the financial district.

What a story that would be,
he thought excitedly. Shouts were all around him now, scattered small groups of people running past him as he stood in the middle of the street. Firebugs, obviously, but what kind of a conflagration would get even a pyromaniac out in this weather? Bennett wouldn’t be able to turn down a firsthand account.

I should be home, though, Archie thought. Should have been hours ago.

Archie weighed the freezing night, the distance to Wall Street, and the thought of Helen warm in bed against the vision of the house on Madison Square. Devil take the cold, he decided. I won’t freeze.

As he turned to follow the ringing fire bells, a group of people swept past, carrying bags, pillowcases, buckets, even washtubs. They continued on past him as if he wasn’t there, and behind them he could see the tenements of Mulberry and Mott Streets disgorging their dwellers, a flow of people swelling into a mob as if some signal had gone out. Archie recognized some of them, people he had worked with or bought fruit from or had sharpen Helen’s knives, and finally managed to catch hold of Mike Dunn, a rail-thin Irishman he knew from the neighborhood.

“Mike!” he shoured over rhe din. “What’s going on here?” As he let go of Mike’s coat, his hand came away black.

“You haven’t heard?” Mike’s eyes gleamed in his srubbled face and a frantic grin bared all of his teeth. “We’re headed for Wall Street. Tonight we make a haul.”

“What, from a fire? Taking bets on what burns, are you, Mikey?”

Mike shifted his weight impatiently. “Not just
any
fire, Archie. The whole bloody First Ward’s gone up. Situation like that, it’s every man for himself, know what I mean? Police won’t do nothin’.”

The black on Archie’s hand started to make more sense. “You’ve been there already?” he asked wanly. If Mike had, it was cerain that Bennett had as well.

Mike had started to run again, but he stopped long enough to shake his head. “No, this is from a little blaze we have going right at home. Pickings are better down south, though.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “See you there.” Mike shouted a laugh and sprinted off after the mob.

A police wagon careened around the corner at Mulberry, and bells rang distantly over the clamor as more and more rival fire crews converged on the blaze. They would do more brawling than firefighting, and then the police would arrest them, but come morning they’d boast about having been there all the same. The racket had also roused a few of New York’s ubiquitous pigs, who braved the numbing cold to nose among frozen garbage and mutter porcine threats over fresh horse manure. Mules and dray horses, even a few oxen pulling carts, pushed through ragged clots of people on foot, and standing in the middle of the street was getting dangerous. Getting in these people’s way down on Wall Street would be dangerous, too, Archie decided. Not a night to be a policeman.

Fire bells sounded again, nearer this time. Looking back to the west, Archie saw bright flames leaping over the jumbled rooftops of the Five Points. There were always bonfires going in the courtyards of the shabbier tenements, but this was much too large for a barrel fire.

A little blaze we have going right at home,
Mike had said; it was on Orange, from the looks of it. The thought got Archie walking again, peering intently at the peculiar shapes brought into vivid relief by the flames. For a moment, they’d seemed oddly like faces. Women’s faces.

In a few steps, he broke into a trot, and then he was running, fighting against the tide that flowed from the slums down toward Wall Street.

The four—
st
ory building
on the corner of Orange and Franklin Streets had been one of the first tenements constructed in the city of New York. Archie had watched it being built in four frenzied days during February of 1832, knowing that when it was finished, he and Helen would finally be able to leave her parents’ house and begin a life of their own after six months in the stifling Brooklyn gentry. They had rented a corner apartment on the third floor before the building was completed and moved on the first of March, meeting Udo when they hired him to move their things from the Brooklyn ferry docks to their new home. Jane was born on April third, midwifed by an old Mexican woman who lived alone in the attic.

Originally the ground floor had been home to small merchants, but they were gone and their place taken by starving, cholera-ravaged squatters. Before being built over, the area had been a swampy pond called the Collect, drained because of its threat to public health. But even with the Collect Pond gone, disease persisted in the Five Points. Its victims lay in courtyards until city crews removed them for burial.

Now Archie stood rooted to the cobblestones of Orange Street, helplessly gaping at the burning, blackened ghost of his home. The roof of the Destiny tenement, called by its tenants the Destitute, tilted and collapsed, crushing the rest of the building beneath it and uncoiling a flattened mushroom of fire into the icy December night. Showers of sparks and embers twisted and danced on the frigid currents of the north wind, whirling away south as the gathered crowd scattered to the other side of the street, away from the building’s roughly carved cornices shattering on the frozen ground. The piles of refuse choking the gutters ignited in the spill of wreckage, and the few fire companies not gone to the financial district gave up, removing their wagons and horses to safety.

As the street cleared, Archie saw a line of bodies laid in a row on the stones of Franklin Street, scarcely six feet from the mounds of burning rubbish and the collapsed innards of the tenement’s rooms. He walked slowly toward them.

Behind him, firemen shouted warnings and someone called out “Suicide!” Archie moved from body to body, peeling back the threadbare coats and blankets covering dead faces. The heat from the fire hung on him like a living thing, steaming the blown snow from his back and shoulders. He lifted the next makeshift shroud, glanced at the tiny form huddled next to it, and sank to his knees.

Helen’s dress was nearly gone, a bit of its high collar and bodice all that remained other than a cuff on one blistered arm, and the laces had burned out of the boots he’d bought her the Christmas past. Her hair was burned away, the skin of her neck and scalp split and blackened, but her face was marred only by singed-away eyebrows and its expression; there was no real fear in it, or pain, but a deep and searching shock, as if something at the very end had surprised her more than burning to death in a dirt-floored tenement privy. Whoever had laid her out had tried to cross her arms over her breasts, but one hand still clutched at the singed collar of her dress as if she’d been choking on something.

Archie stood, wanting to touch her but horribly afraid that she would
feel
dead, that a single touch would strip away the last veneer of disbelief that kept him from walking straight into the firestorm. He couldn’t look again at the little girl, at his little girl.

He turned to the fire, feeling his skin redden under the blast, wanting absurdly to say something to it. I could have been here tonight, he thought. I could have been bathing my daughter instead of swilling beer and handicapping faro. He swiped a sooty hand across his eyes, tears streaking black on his face. Now she’s lying naked in the street with ashes falling in her eyes.

The wreckage that had fallen farther away from the main hulk of the building was burning down, settling into sullen embers, and among them Archie could pick out debris of peoples’ lives—a teapot, the charred rectangle of a box spring, the base of a kerosene lamp, a knife.

As if borne by the fire, the smell of lavender washed over Archie, the smell of Helen’s parents’ home and the goose they had eaten the Christmas before, when he had given Helen the boots she died in. Helen’s mother had given her a set of flatware, and a companion set of knives.

With a hoarse cry Archie ran toward the fire, leaping over the piles of smoking rubbish. A few shouts went up from the crowd, sounds without words. What were the firemen
doing
with their fancy new steam engines?

He kicked the knife out of a pile of glowing ashes, and sparks flared up, caught in the fire’s insistent updraft until the north wind bore them away. Archie’s hair singed, curling white over his forehead as tears evaporated from his cheeks. Wrapping the hem of his coat around both hands, he picked up the knife and dashed back to the opposite side of the street. Another cheer went up from the crowd.

Archie dropped the burning knife and crouched there sobbing, his gaze drifting through the fog of his breath until it came to rest again on the dancing sparks. They seemed to be flying, not just drifting but dipping and weaving amongst themselves like playful birds, all eventually shooting away on the steady howl of the wind.

Women’s faces, he thought. Earlier the flames looked like women’s faces. Helen’s face, saying goodbye, and I didn’t know to look.

The wind shifted and gusted violently, the sparks diving at once back into the roaring flames as if suddenly fleeing the cold night. A soft rain of tiny cinders fell around Archie, and with a booming rumble the rest of the Destiny tenement collapsed into its foundation, timbers falling outward to crush the row of covered bodies. A blast of scorching air knocked Archie off balance; he sat hard in the packed snow, the knife between his feet.

Nothing even to bury, he thought numbly. At least they aren’t naked in the street.

Then the bone-chilling northerly gale returned, and he huddled over the knife, his eyes blank as he stared at burning timbers like shadows in the depths of the blaze.

“I thought you
would run straight in.” The voice had a Spanish inflection. Archie nodded dully, then started as he realized who was speaking. The fire had died down, and when he shifted his weight, the cold groaned in his knees. How long had he stared into the flames? The crowds has dispersed, the firemen gone south. The knife at his feet was dark with soot and cold to the touch.

He gathered it up as the old midwife spoke again. “It would not have helped, you would only have damned yourself,” she said quietly, and Archie heard the click of rosary beads flicking through her fingers. “Everyone you lost tonight, you will see again if God wills it.” She paused, hitching her breath in the middle of a sigh. “Helen and little Nana—Jane, too.”

Archie stared at bare cobblestones where the hot knife blade had melted away the snow. “It
was
Jane, wasn’t it?” he said. He thought he was crying, but the fire had dried his eyes. “I couldn’t tell for certain, she—she was too—” He waved one hand limply in the direction of the fire.

The wooden beads clicked again as she laid a gnarled hand on his shoulder. “Tuesday, Senor Archie,” she said softly, the lines in her craggy face deepened in the dying fire’s glow. “You know the day of the week. She waited a time for you, and they go downstairs and people outside shout fire. Those who got out were running, and she wouldn’t leave the little girl. Three men drag her through the window and her still holding your daughter. The firemen laid them together.”

He stood, scuffing snow across the bare wedge of stone between his feet,
“L
o siento,
Señor Prescott. A beautiful child,” the old woman said, and then Archie stumbled away from her, the knife heavy in his pocket next to his last three dollars as he fled the crowd, fled the noise, the smoke, and the unbearable sorrow.