My Notorious Life (23 page)

Holding him on my shoulder where he whimpered and squalled, I sang to that pitiful skippeen Whiskey in the Jar, and as I led him to his fate I told him, —Never you fear, Johnny, you will be playing soon in the green fields with your pony and eating your pie, climbing a tree in the country, yessirree, and folks’ll give you a toy wagon and tin soldiers and you’ll grow up to be a strong big lad of the prairie. I don’t know why I fed him this pap. He was so raw and new, it seemed a shame to scare him with the truth.

At Twelfth Street at last I came to the Sisters of Mercy, and there in the vestibule I saw a wicker cradle with its plain white curtains and a little sign that said Please Ring the Bell. When nobody was around I put Johnny in the basket thus abandoning him for the second time already in his short life and rang the bell thinking surely Johnny would die like the rest of the babies who was laid there and what could I do about it, or anyone? I ran away from that place with my heart full of ugliness.

B
aby boy Johnny rode on trains through my dreams. In his bunting he flew across the countryside heading West where nobody wanted him for he had no teeth in his gums and his baby arms was not meant for driving a plow. On the train he cried for his Mam, out of the hollow globe of his mouth. You’ll never see me again, Baby Boy Johnny said to me, no more than you will see your own mother or your sister and brother, or find a replacement that could be called kin. In my dream I got on the train and climbed to the top with his little form in my arms and leaped off its speeding roof onto the white plains and woke when my feet startled out straight in the bed, the hard landing of a nightmare. In the cold of the morning I calculated how many years since I seen Joe or Dutch (four) and how many months (nine) since I sent a reply to my sister and had no answer. Seventeen years of age I was, without love nor money. I pictured Charlie’s jail cell as an old potato hole. Was rats crawling on him in the night? Did he feel the hot breath of murderers on his cheek? After eight months in the Tombs, did he think of me?

It seems he did.

At the end of May, when I was settled on my cot for the night with my hair loose on the pillow and my nightdress on, a rap came on the kitchen door that made me startle up.

—Who’s there?

I went to the door and the knock came again in a rhythm. Shave and a haircut.

Two bits, I tapped back.

—Axie? said a voice.

I swallowed. The knocking came fast now, the same as my heart when I flung open the door.

Charlie stood there on the step in the rain, silver grains of it shining on the dark mat of his hair. His suit hung off his bony skellington like it belonged to a fuller man. He was poorly shaved and the collar of his shirt was stained with a ring of grime. The fury of his expression struck me like a hard slap. It was not the reunion I pictured.

—Come in, I said.

He did. He fixed his angry eyes burning on my face so I had to look away. I went to the peg for my shawl and threw it around my bare shoulders to cover them.

—Don’t. He came toward me and pulled the shawl so it fell away. He stared a long time. —Why’d you go with him? he said through his teeth, watching me.

—I didn’t go with no one.

—You DID. You went with Gilpin. He said you did.

—He’s a liar.

—I went to the
Herald
. And after I talked those b******s into taking me back to my job in the printing room, first thing I see is Gilpin, and he says, ‘Jones, I met up with your doxie. A girl named Annie.’

—I went looking for you.

—Gilpin said ‘I tasted her and she’s a nice piece of cake,’ is what he said.

—I asked him where you went to.

—He says you went with him.

—In his dreams.

Charlie’s eyes were hard with suspicion and his fists flexed like they was warming up to strike me. Rain dripped off his coat and formed a puddle on the floor. A wet wool smell came off him, an odor of dungeon, like gruel and mildew. He was not a fella who liked to be cornered, he said once, and he’d been cornered now a while. —Why did he tell me then that you went with him? he hissed.

—I wouldn’t look at that eel Gilpin. Not if I had ten eyes.

He stared me down so hard I needed ten eyes to hold steady against him. In the staring match I seen the wariness of a beat animal in his face, and he seen the set of my jaw softening down out of anger at him. We both of us blinked and looked off a ways.

—I didn’t go with nobody, Charlie, I said again very gentle.

He sagged, and I seen he was still an orphan same as me. Neither one of us had a trusting fiber of muscle, only expectations of the next betrayal.

—Take off your wet coat, I says.

He flang his coat on the back of a kitchen chair. I plucked my shawl up from the floor and wrapped it around myself again. He paced and rested his palms against the sideboard, bent over, taking small fish gulps of air. A current of warning came off his hunched shoulders. At last he walked to the table where he sat pressing his thumbs against his eyes. I fetched Mrs. Browder’s stashed bottle and poured a glass of whiskey and brought it to him. He quaffed it in one swig. I went to the cupboard and took out the plate of cold potatoes and lamb left over from supper. He did not speak even when I put it down in front of him.

—What happened to you? I asked.

His eyes were bright and skittish. He shoveled his food and drank so the apple of his throat rose and fell. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

—What happened?

—The Tombs. The fumes off that word hung in the air.

I cleared his plate. —What else?

—They tried to recruit me for a Union soldier but I acted the cripple.

—What else?

—A pen and paper, and no more questions.

I confess to disappointment at his answer but was glad I’d made him jealous over Bricky Gilpin. It was good revenge for the suffering he put me through. I crept upstairs to the library and brought him down the articles he requested. He thanked me and began to write, scratching away so furiously that sometimes the nib pricked through the sheet, spreading blots like smashed huckleberries on the white page. In the oily lamplight I scoured his plate, took up a sock to mend and listened to the scratch of his writing and the wind outside the door, the slatting rain.

—There now, he said at last, —I’m done.

He extended the paper toward me. Life in the Tombs, an Exposé by Charles G. Jones, was written in a headline across the top.

Like a great cesspool of all that is worst about humanity, there sits downtown on Centre Street a terrible haunted building, which houses the most wretched and friendless souls on earth. This Hades is called The Tombs, and no more apt moniker could be found for the place. Inside its granite walls, human beings are interred without justice and left to rot and crawl with maggots as in a grave. It was there, in a damp cell the size of a pigeon rookery that I spent nine grim months without favor of a trial, and this is my story.

My eyes grew big with horror as I read.

—Like it?

—It’s terrible.

—So I am not a writer, then.

—No! The Tombs is terrible. Your account is not.

—That’s just the first page.

—The first page of what?

—The report I’ll publish in the
Herald,
or whatever paper will pay me the most for it. It’s an exposé. Of corruption. The skulduggery of judges and policemen, the wickedness of prison guards and thieves. Right from inside the heart of the beast.

—An exposé?

—Of a scandal. They kept me without no trial, all this time.

But it was worth it, the jail time, if he could have a story out of it, Charlie said. It was his dream, to be a journalist. I saw it raw on him, the way he talked that night, telling me how the traps locked him up, how he was nearly drafted, how he got out of it because of he faked a bad leg, and how he talked himself back into his job at the
Herald
because they knew he was a first class printer. Soon he’d be a first class newsman, he said. —Will I? Do you believe it?

—I do. Sure I do, Charlie.

He stepped up close and put his hand on my hair. He ran his palm along
the fall of it, down my arm, then without warning he clamped onto my wrist and held it so fiercely I cried out.

—You’re still my girl? he said though his teeth. —Are you?

I nodded, frightened.

He held my jaw in his hard hand and kissed me without tenderness. I hit him and struggled and called him names and full of rage we were carried away to the floor as before where we rolled and pitched over the boards. We crashed into the milk pail, knocked over the broom. I was overcome with the weight of him, the smell that clung to his clothes, his rough beard chapping my cheek. He clawed my skirts.

—Don’t, I said.

—Oh God. Jesus.

—Don’t. I roared at him.

—All right then.

—So stop.

—You didn’t miss me.

—I did. I did so.

—Axie.

—I said NO.

—I dreamed of you. All that time in that place.

—I won’t.

—Jesus.

—I’m serious.

—I see that.

—You’d better see then, you b*****d, I said.

—Kiss me anyway. His old smile was back then, sudden, crooked as the finger he beckoned with. He took the blankets from my cot and spread them on the floor. —Axie Muldoon, he said, grinning, —you’re a pistol, aren’t you just?

He was changeable as hats. A shiny coating of charm now came over him, and he flirted with me and said I was so pretty till I kissed him when he asked me to and fed off the tender flesh of his earlobes and handled him according to his directions. I was happy and not ashamed, bold so it deranged him. —You are a wild woman of Madagascar, he said. —Sweet Jesus. Whatever he asked of me I obliged him. Except. Not that. I learnt
my lesson. Please Jesus God Axie, he cried out. But he could not get the drawers off me. They were a poor defense, and it was my good luck that I did not succumb to the roar of ( . . .) or the hot liquor in my veins, and also that he remained a gentleman.

—You win, he said at last.

We lay exhausted by the hearth amid the barrels of dried peas and barley and Indian meal, and when he smiled at me in the dim murk, a happiness took hold of me that was unfamiliar as a fine white Riesling is to the mouth that knows only pump water.

—Marry me, he said.

I
t was well knownt that one who has kissed a salamander will not be harmed by fire. So perhaps, since me and Charlie both was salamanders who had crawled out from the ooze and offal of Manhattan Island, it was some pull toward survival that threw us to each other. We knew the other’s secrets. We had come through on the orphan train and seen ourselves in the other: me a stiff angry girl mirrored by Charlie who was a flash talker with tricks up his sleeve. His head was full of dreams and mine was full of schemes or vice versa. Anyways it seemed this was more than rhyme enough, and so we married.

The event took place the Sunday before my eighteenth birthday, in the year of 1865, and no matter to me that it was the year the President was shot dead and the year P. T. Barnum’s museum burned and the year Joseph Lister performed the first surgery with antiseptic. What was more significant was that Miss Ann Axie Muldoon and Mr. Charles Great Jones was married before witnesses in the front parlor at 100 Chatham Street. It was not fancy nor splendid. There was no choir, harp, or even a monkey grinder with his accordion. There was no mother nor father to give me away, as they had gone and done that long ago. There was no sister Dutch nor brother Joe to hold my ring or my train, as I had neither ring nor train to hold, and Dutch and Joe and all other remnants of my Muldoon life was lost as ever. It was just me and my boy-o with the Evanses and Mrs. Browder and next-door Greta there as witnesses. A pocky minister named Robinson with a
flask in his pocket and a dust of white dander on his dark jacket that Mrs. Browder had invited was the official. I wore my new dress, a gift from Mrs. Evans, made of cotton muslin with cap sleeves in a lovely shade of cornflower blue.