Printing House Square by Patrick Sean Lee (ebook offline .txt) 📕

I remember well the morning our ship sailed into New York Harbor, beneath the curse of Jesus himself for some sin we knew not what. The twenty-third day of July it was, in the year of Our Lord, 1869.

Ten of the two hundred eighty-one in steerage had died during the voyage from Liverpool on the Kate Dyer—my youngest sister among them. Of those poor lost souls, eight were given to the blackness of the deep with Psalms and tears and lamentations. Two more died as we sailed into the bay and were buried in a paupers’ field. Six were mere children, barely weaned from their mothers’ breasts. Oh, the terrible howls; they echoed through the holds of the ship, and would have split the timbers but that these grieving women were too weak and broken from the voyage to scream more loudly. The soup and gruel they’d fed us even the rats had no use for, and the English captain knew as much. Had we all died, it would have made him smile. His pockets were full, so be done with us.

***
I am strong, as I was back then, and I suspect that is due to some strange quirk of my constitution. Thus, at twenty-one years of age, I survived the trip. Life in Cork had been hard, and I’d grown used to it, but not harder than my birth in America. Blessed Mary, why did you allow it to be so difficult here? We were told by gossip in the pubs and in the proper Roman churches that this new land would welcome us to its bosom and free us from the English curse. Though I could not see it then, I know now that it did.

That morning I arrived at Castle Garden, I was examined for the “Irish Plague” and then set amongst the joyful and the weary on rows of wooden benches, waiting for announcements of employment opportunities across the causeway in the city.

“A bridge is to be built,” an agent announced the second day, and there was great cheering among the carpenters, stone masons, and smithies.

“Line up, those who are under twenty-five and sound of body and spirit.”

Fifty among us hurriedly picked up our jackets and parcels wrapped in cloth, and then took our places before him. We were not told of what nature this bridge would be, only that it would require the skills of strong backs and sound minds to bring the plan of an engineer by name of Roebling to success.

There are many bridges in fair Eire. I remember when I was much younger I helped my dear departed father repair the stone coping on the south end of the Parliament Bridge. Although I carried only the stones to replace those broken out by a wagon’s wheel, it qualified me to state that I had had experience at bridgework. Were Mister Roebling to request that I carry granite or limestone for the next year, sixteen hours each day, I would have been delighted. I would be a bridge builder.

Forty of us were chosen—those among us who seemed fit—and we were led to the causeway where four wagons hitched to swaybacked horses awaited us. The hour was early, although the sun had broken free of the horizon and illuminated the lush new land and the water like no dream of heaven ever imagined. We boarded the wagons in groups of ten, setting ourselves on benches without backs, the smell of clover and horse dung wafting down the island of Manhattan on the low breeze.

To my left a man of about twenty-five years sat. A German, if my ears did not deceive me when he spoke in that harsh language. On my right, a countryman, who I learned soon enough, hailed from Ballyheigue at Kerry.

“And what do you think we’ll be doing?” he asked me on the way. I had no idea, but I answered him.

“Who better than the sons of Ireland to carry the stones? Do you think they’ll be killin’ their oxen when there’s Irishmen, ten for a quid?”
He looked at me proud. “They’ll not kill me; not Joseph Leary. Not if Holy Mary has a word to say on it.”

“Aye. Nor me.”

“And what is your name?” he asked at length.

“Seamus Connor, from Cork, and familiar with limestone, which any worthwhile bridge should be constructed of.”

For the remainder of the journey along the well appointed streets I told Joseph Leary the story of how my father had been chief mason on the Parliament Bridge back home in Cork, and that I, having mastered the worthy craft many years before, had been his foreman. I told him how bitterly old Michael Callahan had resented this, and had cornered me in Kilgarvan Inn one stormy evening—and how I’d battled him like Jacob and Archangel Michael—or perhaps it was Gabriel, I thought back then—out the door and up the street. Being from Ballyheigue, Leary was unlikely to know the falseness of my story. Or my fabricated position on the actual

bridge gang, who labored on it nearly half a century before.
“And so you would be a very young looking man of sixty, I’m sayin’?” he asked with a glint in his eye.

We spoke no more of the bridge, either in New York or Cork.

He and I, indeed every man in the creaking wagon, squinted ahead, looking for a narrower river than the one we travelled alongside. In those days I could read little, but my eyes were as keen as a hawk’s. In the windows of stores and saloons signs abounded, with two words I could make out plainly enough, though.

No Irish

We would not be allowed to sit in their parlors, work in their mercantile stores, drink a pint in their saloons, but we could carry their stone. So be it,

I told myself, I’ll save my meager wages

(for I had no one other than myself to support, now that Rosemary had gone to be with the saints in heaven) and I’ll buy the bloody tollbooth and put up a sign of my own.

No Englishmen…Catholic or Protestant

Some little time later we arrived at a shack sitting a hundred feet, perhaps two, up from the wide river’s edge. The wagons pulled to a stop, and we all looked at one another, wondering just where the smaller river was that we were to begin building a bridge across. To the north, along the shore, floated a barge of Titan proportions, and on it stood a fort, I was certain. Taller than the tallest building in all of Ireland it was, and it dwarfed the men and horses milling about below. Little did I know then that myself and many others were peering at our coffin.

“All right!” a tall man in dungarees and wearing a broad brimmed hat yelled above the murmuring coming from the wagons. “Line up here.” He pointed in the direction of the set of wooden stairs leading up to the door of the shack.

“Those of you who speak English, here,” he said.

A cloud of dust rose as we, the Irish and the English, leapt from the several wagons and ran like eager schoolchildren at recess to take our places. The handful of English stayed well away from us, as though our ignorance and foul odor would swirl about like a banshee and fall upon them with a cry never before heard in this land of plenty.

The command was yelled again in German, Italian, and a few tongues I was unfamiliar with. To our group the man said:
“A bridge is to be built across the river behind you. The caissons are in place that will enable us to dig down to bedrock to set two towers; one on either side of the river. Tons of sand, gravel, and muck will be removed. You will do it.“

We stood shocked. Spanning such a length…I could not conceive it, nor, judging from the looks on their faces, was anyone else able. I wondered who this Mr. Roebling was that he could?

After having shovels and buckets issued to us, the superintendent led us to the wooden behemoth. Entering it, we, the English and Irish, were instructed to sit. The air was compressed, and then we descended into a bell-shaped iron chamber, the depth of the freezing water covering our legs to the calves. My head ached from the increase in air pressure, but the giant Swede, Johannsen, who was our boss, told us in his broken English to hold our noses every time the pain became unbearable and force air into our ear canals.
We dug and picked and shoveled, our legs freezing, our chests heaving with sweat, breathing air unfit for the dead. Two hours we labored, and then we were told to stop and re-enter the air lock. I could hear the clanking of the machinery that decompressed the air. After some time I inquired of Johannsen who sat across from me.

“Sir, why do we not simply ascend and be done with this agony?” For I had no idea at the time what was happening, or why. He eyed my grimly.

“Because if we do, our blood will boil.”

“Sir?”

“Four days ago ten of your countrymen went up without decompressing and suffered violent pains. They call it the bends. Nearly a hundred have suffered thus over the year we’ve been digging. Some will never walk again. More than a score are dead.”

He said no more.

One hour after walking out onto the top of the caisson we were told to return. Over and over this routine went, throughout the day, until by nightfall my legs had permanent cramps from the freezing water, my lungs hurt due to the stale, foul air, my arms felt like they’d had leaden weights attached. But it was my head that ached the most. I did not suffer the bends, thanks to the Swede, but I suffered.

One day’s pay. Two dollars. Thanks be to the Blessed Virgin.

Rather than return to Castle Garden, I trudged through the lower end