The Blackest Bird (28 page)

What joy to the ear!

Who could deny?

“Crime does not pay!”

I
N THE OUTSIDE BREEZE
many Irish pennants and Stars and Stripes flew. Pretty young girls marched out from the church in solemn file. Tommy’s grieving ma exited the building, staggering under the support of two burly boys, holding her weight up at the armpits. Her eyes red as her nose, her cheeks as red as her eyes. Hot tears streaming, splattering on the board sidewalk.

Her life mate, Tommy’s old white-haired da, Timo Coleman, needed, nor accepted, assistance. He was of the task and mind rather to stumble along on his own steam. He managed to stand tall, or at the least as tall as his frame allowed him. Diminutive at an inch south of five feet, he stared straight on, his eyes as blue as the clear blue sky overhead. Unruffled by the commotion surrounding him, with his every step he stepped lively, spry in black suit, emerald green neck stock, his hair as white as new potato shavings, his face every bit as red as blood, most especially the outsized and lavishly veined proboscis.

Somewhere in front of Hays, a brass band started up. A slow procession began tramping through the streets, their sad song sung, what Hays had heard Da Timo Coleman proclaim his favorite at the O’Malley family funeral home, “Whiskey, You’re the Divil.”

O
ut of respect for the deceased, all pallbearers at the funeral of Tommy Coleman wore red satin stripes down their pantaloon seams, as did all brethren Irish gangsters.

The idea derived after one of the most powerful and admired Five Points gangs, the Roach Guards, had taken to wearing a blue stripe down their trouser legs, and the red stripe, in imitation of this, or some misconstrued homage.

The high constable watched the funeral procession snake through the winding streets, until onlookers could be heard beginning to whisper in hushed voices.

Hays could now make out, still blocks away, what he took to be the muffled upraised voices and grumbling of the native-born bands approaching out of the Bowery from the east.

Across Paradise Square, the Irish gangs, the Chichesters, the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, the Shirt-tails, the Forty Little Thieves, among others, grew quiet to better listen.

Hays hurried to a vantage point. Where he stood, above Mulberry, he watched while the Bowery gangsters, a remarkable thousand and a half strong, neared the heart of the Points and hesitated at Cross
Street, ready to meet their adversary gathered in front of them, fifteen hundred belligerent Irish coves.

In recent years a system of police had been suggested by certain political factotums and civilian factioneers, featuring multiple station houses, one to a ward, which might in time of crisis work together in consort, but although Hays found it a fundamentally sound idea, the proposal had been defeated by those fearing a standing army controlled by local government.

Instead, the United States Twenty-seventh Regiment had been repeatedly relied upon of late by local government to quell riots and suppress unrest. Stationed near the Narrows in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, and led by a newly appointed Captain Robert E. Lee, the troops, what was being called a National Guard, with the knowledge that Tommy Coleman’s funeral would afford an occasion for unrestrained racial unrest and belligerence, were put on the ready, but not yet officially pressed into action by Mayor Morris.

By this Sunday afternoon, every Bowery gangster had come boiling out of his hole. The Butcher Boys, the Atlantic Guard, the American Guard, the True-Blue Americans, were all in full assemblage, all in club costume and colors. Something beautiful to behold, they stood at attention, dressed in their spotless undershirts and taut suspenders, gazing down upon Paradise Square.

The day remained crisp; the sky blue. If Hays had been asked, he would have said the sun surely seemed to be smiling down on the remains of Tommy Coleman’s stand-in. A breeze wafted off the East River, another gentled off the Hudson. The trees in the square had lost their leaves. Their brittle remains crunched underfoot.

As Hays watched, having dispatched Balboa to go for the standing reinforcements, the Irish gangsters doffed their funeral attire as quickly as they could, stripping down to their own undershirts and suspenders so as not to spoil their special mourning clothes, with which they took pride.

Suddenly bullies were in hand, slungshots at the ready.

The two forces faced each other on Bayard Street.

The brass band stopped its playing.

The black-dressed women ceased their mournful wail.

Past Hays, fearful civilians scurried to seek higher ground on Cross Street from where they might watch the battle unencumbered, uninvolved, safe.

Below, as the grieving watched, the Bowery b’hoyos took up a cadence rhythmically slapping their truncheons and neddies into their meaty butcher palms, one, two, one, two, in anticipation of battle charge.

A
FTER HER SON WAS KILLED
, Mother Coleman had received word at her airless basement apartment from High Constable Jacob Hays to report to the Dead House behind City Hall to identify her boy’s body.

When she arrived, however, Hays abruptly refused to allow Mrs. Coleman to view her son. Speaking softly, he took her hand in his and told her the boy’s body was in no condition to be seen. It would be too difficult, he said, for a grieving mother to view such carnage under such circumstance.

Instead, like Phebe Rogers before her, Mrs. Coleman identified her child, passed on to a better place, by his clothing. By no means was it lost on Old Hays that Tommy Coleman had escaped death row in his striped prison taupe, and any clothes he might have been wearing on the night he was said to have been killed would have been borrowed or stolen, and certainly not his to be identified.

Still, he allowed Mother Coleman to bawl. “Yes, these are his,” tears staining her creased fat red cheeks. “God rest his miserable soul.”

Even as this charade played out, Old Hays was still half waiting against his better judgment for Sergeant McArdel to reappear his post. When he did not, McArdel’s evident betrayal weighing heavier by the minute hand, the high constable nevertheless took the initiative among his men to speak to them about that Sunday night’s ambush
reportedly by the Watch and local constabulary beneath the Morningside Heights.

“Who among you was there?” he asked, too aware he had been reduced to being unable to trust any single one of them.

As he more than suspected, no one raised his hand.

“Who among you knows by whom or how information regarding the ghouls was relayed?”

No one offered to this either.

He inquired did anyone know the whereabouts of Sergeant McArdel.

No one did.

Sitting at his desk in the Tombs earlier that day of Mrs. Coleman’s visit to the Dead House, the high constable had had the opportunity to read in the
New York Herald
the results of the Great Census of 1842, conducted by the Five Points House of Industry. Identified in the survey were 3,435 Irish families living in the Five Points. Next in number were the Italians with 416 families recorded. Of the English? Only 73.

Hays was not surprised. According to the report, punctuating Paradise Square and its immediate environs were 270 saloons, with several times that number of dance halls, diving bells, blind tigers, buckets of blood, shanghai palaces, houses of prostitution, suicide halls, sporting houses, and greengrocers selling more fermented wet goods of local confection than vegetables or fresh fruits.

So while the battle of Irish and native gangs raged on the streets in front of them, the vast majority of Tommy Coleman’s mourners understandably repaired to one or another of these local Paradise Square emporiums to eat and drink while keeping in view the pitched brawl.

The general alarm had by now been most thoroughly sounded. Old Hays considered wading into the fray, as he once had, the brash maneuver for which he had once been renowned, but he was not that young man any longer. He did have his constable’s staff in hand, but
he chose, at least for the moment, to stay the high ground and wait for the support of guard and his constabulary.

After fifteen minutes of bloody clashing, the Bowery Butcher Boys managed to break free from the pack and circumvent the flank of the Plug Uglies, overwhelming these hated toughs and pushing them back with one sweeping effort.

Eventually the natives rushed the Irishers’ clubhouse on Mott Street with every intention of rendering maximum destruction and harm to this abhorred brotherhood’s residence. But the resilient papists, with the help of the surly Dead Rabbits and Chichesters, beat the natives into retreat, and by means of a brilliant counterattack forced their fierce and detested adversaries north on Orange and east down Hester, out of the Points and back into the Bowery, where they took refuge deep in the bowels of a building on Rivington Street.

The Irish horde charged in behind the Rabbit standard (on this day the corpse of a snow-shoed hare held aloft on a twelve-foot pole), wrecking the place, angrily tearing apart seventeen apartments in two separate tenements.

Reports reached Hays. One city marshal, he was told, had come on the scene. Recognizing his duty, the man had waded into the fray. The Irish ruffians were on him in an instant. They stripped him naked and beat him to the sidewalk. Ultimately he managed to get his assailants off him. He staggered all the way to the station house on North William Street, there to raise the alarm.

The constabulary responded in force to drive the warring factions back to their respective neighborhoods, but it did more harm than good. The fighting was broken up but the gangsters, both Irish and native-born, now spread, and instead of venting their anger and frustration on each other, they became indiscriminate and began to waste the city at large.

At the beginning of the day the sun had been out and an unaccustomed warmth had been in the air. Citizens were tempted to doff their coats and shawls to revel in the mild air. But suddenly and without
warning the weather changed. Whereas it had been warm, now it grew cold. In the space of little more than four hours, the temperature plummeted forty degrees. And by the next day had dropped to a bone-numbing seventeen below zero.

In the hands of criminals, the Second, Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh wards burned as unrest raged. The rioters turned their fury on all they encountered: stables, car barns, private homes, tenement apartment buildings, offices of public finance, wagons, hacks, drays, carryalls, trucks, omnibuses, even fellow citizens.

For the general public there was no recourse, because the very gangsters who were burning the city manned the fire companies whose charge it was to put the fires out. Even honest folk found themselves milling about, marauding and looting. In a car barn on Catherine’s Slip one ginger-haired individual, said to be a hod carrier apprehended in the act of torching a hayloft, was hanged from a streetlight arm, and the police proved unavailable to cut him down, or even to make an appearance on the scene. The man’s thoroughly frozen body, stripped of clothing save his blue woolen pants, bunched at the ankles, dangled there for three miserable days.

E
dgar Poe, since slipping from Hays and his barouche at the farm depot on the upper Bloomingdale Road, had wandered for a week through woods, pastures, and shantytowns in the city’s upper reaches, finally blindly finding his way back to the city proper, sick and hungry. On Doyers Street, at the crook of Murderers’ Bend, he had managed a small bottle of ether from a half-Chinese, and now, through a hangover haze, stood in front of the hanged man’s desiccated body.

As he watched the dead man sway, Poe recalled vividly the most frightening thing he could imagine when a boy was to feel an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch-black room.

At the time the image had so terrified him he would often keep his head buried under the covers until he nearly suffocated himself.

His stepfather, John Allan, had little sympathy for his shenanigans. He scolded the lad, lecturing that the boy picked up such nonsense from lazing about the slave quarters with his friend, the house nigra, Dabney Dandridge, listening to the foolish ghost stories stupidly regaled by the Negro slaves while sitting about in the dark around their dying cookfires, scaring themselves, and him, half to death.

Allan, a Scots mercantilist, scoffed and told the child, a laddie he would never consider his son, to cease and desist from such nonsense or face the consequence.

Yet even now, so many years removed from his boyhood, he stood remembering those days, distraught in the icy cold, shivering and ailing, unable to rid his mind of another time, when passing a graveyard, he jumped into his stepmother Frances Allan’s arms, begging, “Save me! Save me! They will run after me and drag me down.”

Powerless to tear his eyes away, he moaned. In front of him swung the deep-frozen body of an individual he could not imagine ever having known; yet something about the dead so familiar. Still, on that spot identification seemed beyond his fevered ken as the body, suspended from its rope, twisted in the ghastly gale.

Icicles hung from the dead man’s closed eyelids, from his splayed nostrils, from his twisted blue lips. Hoarfrost pocked his cheeks and chest. Urine and feces, the bodily fluids frozen solid, ran from shriveled member and mottled purple marbleized haunches down thick, hairy, naked legs.

Like the twin blades of scissors, the cold sliced off the East and North rivers, converging on the lower island, snipping off far below the root all hope for human comfort. Poe pulled his old West Point greatcoat tighter to his emaciated body. He coughed up sputum, green and black, hawked on the hardscrabble ground. The wind blew the expectorant back into his face. He wiped himself with his coat sleeve.

“Time to go home,” he addressed the aggrieved body of the dead man, and suddenly remembered him, Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch, from the Tombs. Of course. The man had oft escorted him through the corridor to John Colt’s cell. The ginger hair was the giveaway. “If Muddie will have some soup, Sergeant, it will surely be our body guard,” Poe addressed the corpse. “I feel a bout of ill health coming on. Do you?”

He broke away from his transfixion, leaving him of the frozen-stiff
ginger hair and grotesquely stretched neck twitching in the wind, and started north, hugging the East River docks.

The city had become quiet in the aftermath of the last days’ melee. The Twenty-seventh Regiment was now in attendance on the streets and corners. The rioters had finally gone home. Along the waterfront, a splintered wake of broken slats and rowboats in dry dock, smashed windows of warehouses and feed bins, overturned barrels, and whinnying horses, stood the legacy of urban warfare. But this evidence soon gave way only to frozen swamp as Poe made his plodding pilgrim’s progress.

He had set his destination as Weehawken Street, to an inn he knew called the Lubber’s Friend, where he had a recollection someone, an acquaintance (could it have been John Colt’s brother Sam?), had vouched him a room.

Was it not here, at this destination, the Lubber’s Friend, where he had once stayed with she who was no longer of this earth?

Could he remember? For the life of him, could he?

Upon first setting out, every few steps he turned, peered back over his shoulder, heard the creak of the rope as Sergeant McArdel of the Night Watch slowly spun. Then it was gone, out of earshot, out of sight, and he was beyond the river bend where it turned west-northwest at Houston Street.

He took Lewis Street, past the shipyards, reached Eighth Street via that route, continued due west, and soon was crossing the expanse of land once the farmstead of Peter Stuyvesant. He cut up two blocks and looked in at the St. Mark’s churchyard, the spot where seven nights before he had laid watch beneath the twin Dutch elm trees, his eyes trained on the still-open grave of John Colt, holding his breath lest the spirits of the graveyard enter his body.

In self-absorption the poet thinks everything is known. His eyes aglow, a fire beyond malnutrition burns, madness, imbalance, within.

When finally he reaches a place of warmth, the poor inn on Weehawken Street (indeed there is a bedstead reserved for him, and paid
in full besides), he slumps immediately at the writing table and composes a letter to his Muddie in Philadelphia.

“Oh my dear, darling Mother,” he writes, clutching his brow. “It is now three weeks since I saw you, and in all that time your poor Eddie has scarcely drawn a breath except in intense agony. My clothes are horrible and I am so ill.”