I suppose calling it
Five Points was ironically accurate, myself and my young brother
having witnessed as many stabbings in just our first month in New
York. This was Paradise Square, which was anything but. You can blame
it on the Irish, the irony not the crime, well not all of it. My
brother and I would sit on the corner of Orange street and stare at
the side of the mission building like we could see the sun rise and
set through the patchwork wood walls and pitch, sooty smoke of coal
and wood burning. Probably bodies burning too, but I didn't learn of
that until much later, little Alex never got the chance. My mother, God rest her
soul, passed on the ship bound for Ellis Island in the year of Our
Lord 18-hundred and forty-four, just three days before we sailed into
port. My father, a good Irish Cathol with a rolling Gaelic tenor that
could soothe a banshee, hailed from Derry. He had made quite a name
for himself with his storytelling, poems, and jokes. Back home he
did, but here in New York there wasn't much time or patience for
stories, less for poetry, and nothing to joke about, save for the
death, murder, and disease, but it became too redundant to speak of
and poor subject matter. So, my father, he drank. The boom of the
industrial revolution had faded to a droning whine and the only jobs,
past whoring, gambling, and stealing, were all held by those that had
come over a decade or so before us. So, where there was no work,
there was whiskey, and though the landlord would be banging down our
door every week for rent and for days at a time there wouldn't be
wood for the fire or fresh milk for me and my brother, me dad he
always had the drink, and drink he did. Little Alex had taken to
wearing our mother's nightcap to bed, he would raise such a din if
he misplaced it the whole building would moan and bang the walls. He
refused to sleep without it. Alex was... touched. In the head. He
wouldn't speak much at all and when he did he would shiver as if
freezing for a moment then clam up and sway back and forth. Dad
called him “his poor little defective”, I never much liked Dad
calling him that, but he would swear up a storm and beat me something
fierce if I spoke out. I never really cared about getting beat, all
the boys got beat, and not just by our Mums and Da; if ever two coins
clinked together in your pocket you couldn't get ten paces without
being pulled into an alley or knocked about the back of the head in
the middle of the street. We fought, me and my boys, and we fought
well; I suppose Dad helped with that. I never minded, but poor little
Alex caught the worst of it when Dad had taken to the drink too hard.
I always knew the nights it would happen. Dad would be up at all
hours of the morning, weeping and singing Green Grow the Lilacs,
our mother she loved lilacs when she was alive, was buried with a
whole great bunch of them donated by some of the kinder folks in our
building. And Dad would be singing and weeping and drinking the whole
time until he finished the last verse and then he'd just sit silently
for a while. He would never say a word, he'd just slowly creep into
our room and snatch Little Alex up out of bed, tear the nightcap off
his head and beat him fiercely. Tears and rage in his eyes, teeth
gnashing like some beast, and fists aflight upon poor Little Alex. I
tried to stop him a time or two until he broke my arm, then I just
became too terrified to stand up and I'd lay in bed pretending to be
asleep as Little Alex would scream, the sound of our father's fists
on his back and head like thunderclaps. None of the other folks in
the building even noticed, which wasn't too surprising since all
you'd ever hear, day and night, was someone being beaten, a woman
weeping, consumed in sorrow for a dead son, or daughter, or husband,
the whore down the hall would have visitors at all hours making a
racket, and the family beside us had eleven children, three cousins,
and four big sheep dogs; quiet was a commodity no one had in excess,
and so we minded our own business and they minded theirs. My boys had
seen me so many times with a black eye or a split lip from me own Dad
they came to call him the Giant, and my brother and I were prisoners
in his house. I taught myself how to write and read a bit, there
wasn't a school that'd have us, what with Little Alex being in his
condition and me showing up all bruised and battered and both of us
as destitute as they come. The Mission tried for a little while, but
the money ran out and they had been robbed so many times the doors
shut and chains were run up to keep everyone out. So after a
particularly awful night and Little Alex just being left unconscious
for well over an hour I took to leaving little notes for my father
under his bottle. I would sneak up, quiet as a mouse, just a bit
before dusk and take a bright blue paper from a notepad I'd swiped
and in pencil write:
Your wife, though
deceased, still watches from Heaven
Her ears being
deafened by thund'rous blows to her sons
Know your wife, she
weeps, ever' night and all day
When you again meet
your wife, will your heart prove true?
I
would leave this for him at least a few times a month, whenever he
got a hold of Little Alex real bad. He'd rouse from his drunk and
find it and go pale as a ghost. He thought it were the faeries
warning him, or perhaps even Christ Almighty himself, but it only
staved off his fury for a few days, then he'd crawl back into his
bottle and Alex, poor Little Alex, would pay the price. And we went
on, Dad being drunk and out of work, me and me boys fighting up and
down and across Paradise Square being chased by coppers and crooks,
and poor Little Alex, clinging to our Mum's nightcap, rocking back
and forth in perfect silence on our bed. After the city ran a
Neighborhood Reclamation project, nothing more than cops beating the
brains out of any man, woman, or child unlucky enough to fall under
their billy club out in the Square, what little change my father
could scrape up from singing and joking and reciting his raunchy
limericks and poems went away, and things got worse than I could have
ever feared. A man in our building, a syphillitic little squirt, had
taken to making his own shine and, half blind and out of his head, he
would gift this to our Dad for running his wares about the building.
A mere capful of the stuff could send the stoutest son of Ireland to
bed upside down, but our Dad would drink it by the mugful, and repeat
the process until he couldn't barely even lift the stuff to his lips.
And so one night, staggering and smashing into the walls of our
hovel, he barged in and brought Little Alex up by the neck of his
nightshirt and beat him so bad he bled from both his ears. I didn't
dare to move, though I wanted to scream and drive a knife into his
heart, for fear that he'd kill me only little brother if I made a
sound. Dad passed out at the foot of our bed in a puddle of Alex's
blood and his own drool and vomit, snoring as I cradled my poor
little brother in me arms, rocking him back and forth until he
finally stopped crying and fell asleep. Another night of this was
more than I could stand and I knew my father had at least three more
jars of this Devil Water in the cupboard out of my reach. The next
day I ran about with me boys for a bit, I stopped and chatted with
our neighbors and pet the great big sheep dogs, I swiped a bit of
seashell from a stall in the Square and gave it to the bright-eyed
lass whose family just moved into the tenement the week before and
when I came home I put Little Alex to bed while Dad sat at the table,
mug in his quivering fist, staring at the wall. I put Little Alex to
bed on my side and, when he was sound asleep, carefully slipped our
Mother's nightcap from off his head and put it on my own. I pulled
the blanket up and tried to cram myself all together, to look small,
small like poor Little Alex. It weren't an hour later that our door
came crashing open, nearly pulling from the rusted hinges, and our
Dad, God Rest His Soul, took me up by the collar of me nightshirt and
beat me something fierce. My body bounced and rocked, held fast in
his clenched, white-knuckled fist, until he landed the last blow and
I went limp, my fingers uncurling and, crumpled up in my palm, the
last note I ever wrote to me Father, me poor, poor Father fell to the
floor. I kept this one short, there wasn't much more for me to write
or say anyhow, it was just one stanza:
Though drink you
must, and drink you may
Know your wife, and
your only son, they weep, ever' night and all day
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