Ironweed - William Kennedy [78]
Old Shoes stood up and made ready to leave. “Nobody wants a ride?” he said.
“All right, goddamn it,” Francis said. “Whataya say, Rudy? Let’s get outa this pigswill. Get outa this stink and go where I can breathe. The weeds is better than this pigswill.”
“So long, friend,” Moose said. “Thanks for the wine.”
“You bet, pal, and God bless your knee. Tough as nails, that’s what Francis is.”
“I believe that,” Moose said.
“Where we goin’?” Rudy asked.
“Go up to the jungle and see a friend of mine. You wanna give us a lift to the jungle?” Francis asked Old Shoes. “Up in the North End. You know where that is?”
“No, but you do.”
“Gonna be cold,” Rudy said.
“They got a fire,” Francis said. “Cold’s better than this bughouse.”
“By the lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings,” Rudy sang.
“That’s the place,” Francis said.
o o o
As Old Shoes’ car moved north on Erie Boulevard, where the Erie Canal used to flow, Francis remembered Emmett Daugherty’s face: rugged and flushed beneath wavy gray hair, a strong, pointed nose truly giving him the look of the Divine Warrior, which is how Francis would always remember him, an Irishman who never drank more than enough, a serious and witty man of control and high purpose, and with an unkillable faith in God and the laboring man. Francis had sat with him on the slate step in front of Iron Joe’s Wheelbarrow and listened to his endless talk of the days when he and the country were young, when the riverboats brought the greenhorns up the Hudson from the Irish ships. When the cholera was in the air, the greenhorns would be taken off the steamboats at Albany and sent west on canal boats, for the city’s elders had charged the government with keeping the pestilential foreigners out of the city.
Emmett rode up from New York after he got off the death ship from Cork, and at the Albany basin he saw his brother Owen waving frantically to him. Owen followed the boat to the North Albany lock, ran along the towpath yelling advice to Emmett, giving him family news, telling him to get off the boat as soon as they’d let him, then to write saying where he was so Owen could send him money to come back to Albany by stagecoach. But it was days before Emmett got off that particular packet boat, got off in a place whose name he never learned, and the authorities there too kept the newcomers westering, under duress.
By the time Emmett reached Buffalo he had decided not to return to such an inhospitable city as Albany, and he moved on to Ohio, where he found work building streets, and then with the railroads, and in time went all the way west on the rails and became a labor organizer, and eventually a leader of the Clann na Gael, and lived to see the Irish in control of Albany, and to tell his stories and inspire Francis Phelan to throw the stone that changed the course of life, even for people not yet born.
That vision of the packet moving up the canal and Owen running alongside it telling Emmett about his children was as real to Francis, though it happened four decades before he was born, as was Old Shoes’ car, in which he was now bouncing ever northward toward the precise place where the separation took place. He all but cried at the way the Daugherty brothers were being separated by the goddamned government, just as he was now being separated from Billy and the others. And by what? What and who were again separating Francis from those people after he’d found them? It was a force whose name did not matter, if it had a name, but whose effect was devastating. Emmett Daugherty had placed blame on no man, not on the cholera inspectors or even the city’s elders. He knew a larger fate had moved him westward and shaped in him all that he was to become; and that moving and shaping was what Francis now understood, for he perceived the fugitive thrust that had come to be so much a part of his own spirit. And so he found it entirely reasonable that he and Emmett should be fused in a single person: the character of the hero of the play written by Emmett