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

of the island seeking a meal, a drink, and a place to lay my head; in that order. I walked into a boarding house a block from the river and approached a matronly-looking woman standing like an angry schoolmarm, glaring at me.

“Pardon, mum. I need a room, a meal, and if you have it, a whiskey.”

She wiped her hands on her apron and replied in a voice that could stop a mile-long train.

“Be off with ya’, shanty Mic! We don’t serve nor board Irishmen. Are ya’ blind as well as stupid? The sign is in the window, ya’ lout. And ‘bove me there’s ano’er,” she said pointing up. “Get on with ya’!”

“Then just somethin’ to eat. I’ve worked…”

“I said be on with ya’!”

And so I left, only to find another and another, and then another boarding house, each with the same putrid Sluagh telling me to be off with my Irish self.

At length I fell into a whorehouse in a filthy area named Five Points, and was treated more kindly—not since my arrival in New York, but since my very birth. It is true, I left Madame O’Reilly’s without a dime in my pocket come morning, but I left with a full belly, a quart of whiskey thrown in to flavor the stew, and remembrance of Margaret McGrady’s lovely breasts and loins to comfort me. All of this for a single days’ wage. God bless the Irish, who take care of their own.

The next day of my labors was no better or worse than the first, except for the hour between the drudgeries at the bottom of the caisson. Standing on the bank of the river were six men, dressed like the finest gentlemen in the world. I watched them. One in particular drew my attention; a very animated sort, who the rest, save one, slathered over like whelping pups.

“That there is Boss Tweed,” Johannsen informed me when he noticed my attention fixed on the men. “The tall one is Mr. Roebling, himself.”

The tall one seemed not impressed with the project’s boss, but as I learned months later, he was in no way connected to our living and dying other than stuffing dollar notes by the bushel into Tweed’s large pants, supplied with narrowed eyes by them that built the bridge. Had he said stop, the bridge, the dead, and the crippled, would remain to this day as they were then. When Tweed was told of the foulness of the caisson bottom, he simply said, “There are more Irishmen to slough it out than the pope has prick sores. Make them work harder. That’s why we have paupers’ graves. Their goddam’ mothers are manning the whorehouses anyway.”

That was told to me by Leary, and knowing the imagination of my kinsmen, I suspect there was some truth to it, but just how much was open to a friendly argument or fight over a glass or two of good Irish whiskey.

Our days came and our days went. I befriended certain of the English in time, though not many of the Italians or French, due I think to the language more so than the Italians constant farting, or the French’s constant bellyaching. Still, we worked side by side, sweating from the waist up, freezing from the knees down. When the days ended, though, they all went their way to respectable boarding houses; some to families, none to a hellhole as vicious and mean as the Five Points. Margaret McGrady was a comfort there, to be sure, but my blessed mother taught me better. “If you intend to rise above the stench of your birth, Seamus Connor,” she'd said, “then make certain if ya’ earn a leath fingin a day, put away a feoirling.”

I left Margaret’s nightly delights (though I returned to them each Sunday eve—never on the Lord’s Day), left the fine Irish stew served me in a real porcelain bowl, the excellent whiskey, and found quarters in a slum of a building at a tenth the price three blocks away on Mott Street. It was a danger to walk about on a hot summer’s night, as much so on a sweltering day, because of the gangs; any of which would slit your throat for a penny. I must say, though, it was the Irish robbing and murdering their own, and not the damned English causing all the hell.

The winter of that first year descended down the Hudson like a white dam that burst, leaving the city covered in snow, scores of dead mummified in bleak doorways, the river choked with ice, and conditions inside the caisson more miserable than ever. Men coughed constantly, plagued not only by the foul air, but also by pneumonia. In my attempt to stave off the stench and diseased air, I wore a cloth, bound tightly around my nose and mouth, which made breathing all the harder. At the end of each day, two dollars richer and alive, I made my way home, shunning the beggars and lure of whiskey in the saloons along the way. I found a forlorn bookstore standing just outside the five points on Pine Street one afternoon, purchased several volumes at ten cents apiece, and began my education; this more so to stave off the boredom of my existence than to join the ranks of the scholarly. After all, what good would it have done me to quote Chaucer or Dante to hacking men in an iron casket?

I learned of the English through their finest writers, of the French from theirs. I learned of the evils my church inflicted on the masses over the centuries past, and yet loved her more despite it. Through my reading of the lives of our saints I learned that it is better to forgive than to hate. I learned from the British-American, Benjamin Franklin, that indeed, a penny saved is a penny earned, and so I followed his and my dear mother’s advice religiously.

There may be no justice—real justice—in our world of poverty, ignorance, and deep-rooted hatreds, but there are those who will stand against these scourges like the buildings in my city that stand against the fierce heat of summer and the raging winds of winter. Like the scores of men and women who refuse to be beaten by the savagery of those seasons, and somehow live to see another year by the strength of faith, hope, and charity. Like the bridge, now completed and glorious, that was built by the Irish, the English, the Germans and so many others; the life blood of the old world called to the shores of a fresh and beautiful, endless continent. America.

I have invested the money I earned by sweat in a small printing press. I have a small shop, crowded with reams of paper, a desk, a stove, and ideals. If I leave nothing else to posterity upon leaving this earth, I will leave the best of me. My hope for the death of hatred and cultural tyranny once and for all. Should I prosper in the coming years, I will return to the Five Points and begin the rescue of my beloved kinsmen. Perhaps my partner, a certain William Whittington from Liverpool, an Anglican, a fine editor and friend, will go there with me.
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Text: (c) Patrick Sean Lee, 2011
Publication Date: 11-14-2011

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