Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker Page B

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HERBERT WILLIS ROBINSON
    In New York the machines don’t work and the men won’t. The streetsweepers are on strike and the machines they brought in to replace them don’t clean anything, they only wet down the trash and scatter it around. New piles of trash spring up around them—empty bottles, cabbage leaves, fish bones, scraps of clothing. (It is the iron law: Wherever there is a pile of trash, New Yorkers will throw more and more, pretending that is where it is supposed to go.)
    Dead horses line the gutters where they fell. That’s the surest sign of how hot it is. The worst heat of the summer yet, humidity already thick enough to make you feel as though you washed in molasses.
    Two brawny Irish laborers wobble on ahead of me, arms around each other’s shoulders, drunk as lords at seven in the morning. There is no doubt about it, something is in the air today. They thought it was a good idea, having the first day of the draft on a Friday. Get it started, get it over with, and let things cool down over the weekend. Instead it just gave them time to talk and plot, away from their jobs, just gave the heat time to settle itself upon us—
    I am still headed down the island, toward my place of employment at the New York Tribune. After I stop in at the Trib, I must get back up to Paradise Alley and check on Maddy. She won’t fare well if there’s trouble. Maybe I can convince her to come up to my house inGramercy Park, take shelter in the servants’ quarters—though I doubt it. She refuses me everything now, things for her as well as for me. She refuses even to play our little game anymore. Relying, instead, on that big horse pistol she has gotten hold of. Brandishing it in her little hand with a laugh —If there’s trouble, I can take care of meself—
    My Maddy. Still so willful, so beautiful, even though she rejects me. She’s seen so much in her life. But she’s never seen a mob.
    The boy gazes up at me from the gutter. The pool of blood engulfing his paper boat, dragging it down into the whirlpool. He wipes his hand across his face, smiling, spreading the blood from ear to ear—
    I don’t know why his face stays with me so. Most days I would not look twice. You can see one like him on almost any street corner in town. Just another child of the City at his play—
    At Eleventh Street I stop to watch an Irish construction crew, putting up a double tenement on the site of Abraham De Peyster’s old mansion. I can never resist pausing to watch the City make itself over again, its constant risings and contractions like that of a giant anaconda, or a copperhead, shedding its skin.
    I have been watching this same crew for weeks, toiling in its pit of yellowed mud. By now they are so familiar I can identify most of them by sight. The big, red-bearded fellow, a natural captain of men, who is the foreman. The short one, slightly hobbled, but built thick as a bull in the chest, able to lift whole beams by himself. Two others, both with dark complexions and thick, curly beards, who look enough alike to be brothers, perhaps even twins. All of them in their stiff canvas pants and work shirts, filthy bandannas tied around their necks, identical bent straw hats to shield them from the broiling sun.
    Day after day they nibbled away at old De Peyster’s stately Dutch brick home and garden, determined as ants, with only the most primitive of tools, shovels and picks and sledgehammers, even their bare hands.
    Question: Why is the wheelbarrow the greatest invention of all time?
    Answer: Because it taught the Irish how to walk on two feet.
    It is good to see someone—anyone—working again, after all the strikes in the last few months. The strike of the longshoremen, and thegasmen, and the streetsweepers. The strike of the tailors and the hatblockers, the ship’s joiners and the ship’s caulkers, the coppersmiths and the carpenters