Paradise Alley (55 page)

•
55
•

We should have seen the ambush coming.

Carpenter rushed his men up the Third Avenue on the few streetcars the mob had left intact, trying to spare their strength. I tag along with them, watching breathlessly as they drive the mob back from the Steam Works. Fighting just as hard as they did yesterday, their arms and the locust clubs attached still rising and falling just as pitilessly.

But this time the mob breaks much too easily. It gives ground whenever the police approach. The rioters no longer fleeing blindly for their lives but taunting and baiting us, chanting obscene songs and insults as they retreat slowly up the Second Avenue, toward Murray's Hill.

Carpenter pushes his men after them, trying to crush the insurrection right here and now. He waves his nightstick in the air like a sword, yelling to his officers above the fray:

“On!
On!
”

They spring their trap as soon as we pass Thirty-fourth Street. All at once we are surrounded. A whole new mob pours out of their hiding places, the houses and bars all up and down the street. Surging into the avenue behind us—cutting us off.

Suddenly, the rioters who had been retreating before us stand their ground—the men brandishing their axes and spikes, and sending up a raucous, triumphant, bloodcurdling cry. They have chosen their spot
well, trapping us between Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets. It is a finished block, one with no empty lots to escape through—only tenements four and five stories high, looming above us like canyon walls.

I hear a familiar scuttling sound above me and look up. They are scampering along the rooftops now, crouching by ready piles of dismantled chimneys, and uprooted paving stones. More of them stand in the windows with rifles. Their women and children, even with babes in arms, right beside them, come to watch the show. Crowing down at us exultantly:

“You'll be killed like rats before you leave the ward!”

The Metropolitans hesitate now, beginning to lose their cohesion, as trapped men often do. I can see their eyes darting around for some way out. The maddened crowd roaring wildly, waving its pikes and axes.

And there, at their front—still alive somehow, even after being hurled unconscious through the window of a tavern—is that hideous creature from the central park. I would not believe it could be him, but there is no mistaking it.
Their Mose.
Still wearing the same ludicrous chunk of wood they decorated him with, the crude sign reading
no draft!
Looking more hideous than ever now—ugly red slashes, from where the Metropolitans put him through the window back on Amity Street, ringing the top of his brow. The dried blood streaked down his face, more puncture wounds along his wrists and hands.

He rages and spits his defiance at Carpenter's police. A club in his right hand, his left hand beckoning:
Come on, come on—

A shot lands in our midst—the soft, lead ball splintering on the granite paving stones. Fragments fly up into the shin of a roundsman, making him howl with pain. More balls and bricks begin to land among us, and the Metropolitans waver—pulling back into a tighter circle all around me, bracing themselves, but with a hint of fear in their eyes now.

“At 'em, men!”

Carpenter comes roaring to the fore, refusing to accept that he is trapped. Urging his men forward still, despite the odds—

“At 'em, now, and take no prisoners!”

They charge ahead—arms still rising and falling, rising and falling. Breaking one head after another, pushing the mob back at first by sheer will. Carpenter has his revolver out again, firing carefully, trying to cut a swath through the mob for his men. He hits one rioter
directly in the chest, a bright bloom of red bursting through his shirt. Another man doubles over like a rabbit, shot in the stomach, then still another goes down—

But a blizzard of bricks and bullets is falling on us now. Somehow, Carpenter himself remains unscathed—but as I watch, a paving stone hits a roundsman in the shoulder, knocking him to the floor and breaking his collarbone. Another cop beside him falls, this one shot through the back. He tries to rise, but spits out a stream of dark red blood, falls back in the street again. More bricks and stones fall on men's arms, their shoulders and legs and heads. Knocking them down, sprawling them out in the street—

I look up, the gallery of mocking faces spinning before me in the upper-story windows. All of them watching as avidly as they would any blood-and-thunder at the Bowery. The faces of toothless old men, and gawking children, of women not that different from Maddy. They wave their aprons and handkerchiefs, screaming and cursing. Hurling down anything they can at us, urging their men on with their bone-chilling cries:

“Die at home! Die at home!”

Carpenter's policemen struggle up again, still fighting desperately—fighting for our lives now. But they can make no further headway against the mob, trapped as they are by the sheer weight of the people jammed into this one block. My own arms are pinned to my sides, unable even to get to the Colt that Acton gave me, and I realize that I could actually die here, in the Second Avenue, of all places. Wondering what Maddy will do then.
Will she mourn me? Think that I have forgotten her?

There—at the head of the crowd—I spot that creature with the
no draft!
sign again. I am sure that I must be dead now, and descended into hell. Somehow, he is still charging into the police like some sort of berserker, snarling and laying all about with his club. He sends one cop sprawling with a blow to the head, throttles another one with his own locust club—the roundsman gagging and sputtering horribly.

He fights his way steadily closer, threatening to break through the line all by himself. Moving relentlessly, right toward where I am standing, watching his progress with a morbid, frozen fascination.
He is coming to kill me—

“Hold, men! Hold and give 'em hell!” I can hear Carpenter still shouting—but his voice sounds hoarse and desperate, even the bravado stretching thin.

“Hold!”

Abruptly, as if in response to his shout, the mob that came up behind us begins to waver. Just a little quiver through their ranks—but enough to make even the grizzled creature from the park turn around, to see what is going on.

Then we can hear the drums. A solemn, martial roll, calling troops into the line. Looking downtown, we can see something else through the mob—a long, dark patch of blue, formed across the whole width of the Second Avenue.

“Disperse!
Disperse,
damn ye!”

It is Colonel O'Brien's men, the 11th Volunteers. Unable to find another streetcar, they have followed us uptown by forced march, arriving just in time. Some of the mob turns to face them now, taunting and mocking—expecting to put them to flight just like the Invalid Corps troops they routed yesterday.

But these are able-bodied men, veterans, most of them, who have seen battlefields from Antietam to Fredericksburg to Chancellorsville. They hold their ranks, impervious to anything the mob can throw at them. As I watch they form quickly into two regulation volleying lines, one kneeling, the other standing behind them, both straight as a ramrod. The muskets of the soldiers clearly visible—pointed at us as well as the mob.

The mob starts to break then, some of the rioters running for cover. The creature who is leading them, though, refuses to budge, standing his ground only yards from the guns.

“It's just blanks! It's just blank cartridges!” he insists, and the rest of them begin to rally to him. They move slowly in on the soldiers, shuffling and spitting, shouting their defiance. The women in the windows above echoing their every cry:

“Go back to the war! We ain't some bunch of Southern rabble!”

“Go to hell, ye bunch of Invalid shirkers!”

“Die at home!”

But Carpenter is yelling, too—at his men, at the rest of us—exhorting us to get out of the way of the volley: “Down! Down! Get down!”

“Disperse!”

We drop flat on our bellies. The mob no longer engaged with us, all of them turning back to face the troops. Peeking up from the paving stones, I can make out O'Brien, standing beside his men as straight as a lead soldier—a tough little terrier of a man, with a bristling black mustache. He brings his unsheathed sword up to his shoulder, the silver blade flashing in the sunlight. Then it sweeps downward—and a row of fire erupts along the line.

“Get down!”

The mob staggers backward to a man. Throwing up their hands, pushed back by the very blast from the guns—stumbling and even falling, staring down at themselves.

Only to find that they are whole.
For a moment, we all stare at each other, police and rioters alike, wondering what is going on. Then I hear fresh screams and wailing from the windows above us, and look up again.

There, in one of the third-story windows, I can see a woman holding up the limp body of her young daughter. A boy stretched out over the next sill, a red stain growing on his shirt. The woman holding the child begins to scream, and from the windows across the street more women begin to scream back, until the whole block is filled with the same desolate Irish keening I heard at the cave-in yesterday morning.

O'Brien has had his men fire high, to make sure he didn't hit any of the police in front of him. Instead their volley has raked the houses and the roofs, all up and down the street, hitting many of those who were hurling stones and their invective down upon us—and the children. Now the mob in the street, finding themselves mostly unharmed, turns on the troops again, their rage redoubled. Many of the men gesturing at their own chests, as if daring them to shoot. But the soldiers hold their line—

“Murderers! Butchers! You long-necked Yankee killers!”

“Disperse!”

The second line of troops fires now—and this time bodies begin to fall along the pavement. There is another volley, the mob reeling and breaking, and O'Brien orders his men to fix bayonets and charge. All around me, Carpenter and his men are already back on their feet, hitting everything they can see with a renewed fury.

• • •

The rioters break, and run at last, fleeing into homes and taverns all along the block. Within minutes, the block is cleared, and suddenly quiet, the mob all fled, or in hiding. Some Metropolitans grab the wounded boy from the window—who is still alive, miraculously enough—and his mother, and bundle both of them off to the hospital over her vehement protests and curses.

The woman whose daughter was killed, meanwhile, makes her way down to the street, still carrying the body of her dead child. She no longer screams, but her eyes look dazed and blind. The soldiers and the cops turn away from her, embarrassed, one of them crossing himself as she limps past. She is barefoot, I notice, like so many of them, a dirty red shawl wrapped around her head, her dress a crude patchwork of bright cloths, yellow and red and green. She stumbles on across the Second Avenue while the soldiers form ranks beside her, to begin the march back downtown, and leave her to her dead girl.

I linger behind on the block. Wanting to see—what, exactly? What is left now, but the woman weeping over her dead daughter? Pushing the story on, through one edition after another.
And then? And then?
Wondering if it makes any sense at all to bring Maddy out into such a City—

Across the street I spot my friend Father Knapp. He is making the sign of the cross over the back of a man who lies motionless along the curb. When I approach him he looks up at me with a numbed face, his collar and cassock stained with soot. Wearing the stole of his poor parish around his neck—white on one side, penitential purple on the other. He finishes his duties and accepts the arm that I offer him, rising stiffly from the pavement, but ignores all my entreaties that he find some food and a bed for himself.

“Have you seen what is going on?” he asks me, his voice so hoarse it is little more than a whisper. “Have you
seen
it?”