BARREN ISLAND

The City eats horses. Dozens and dozens are floated over from New York in a day, more than a hundred when it is hot, they say. Some shot in the head by a horse doctor or one of the Cruelty people but mostly they just fell over in their traces and are unharnessed and left in the street till one of the wagons picks them up. If the shoes have been left on they get pulled off and tossed into the pile and sold back to the ferriers. Jubal yanks the hooks into the tendons just below the hocks on a big roan’s back legs so it can be winched down the slide, then pops the shoes off as fast as he can. It goes a lot faster when they’re dead.

The scrapers are next, running their quick blades over the body, razoring off manes and tails, separating the hair by color if it’s for brushes or not if it’s for plaster, and then the skinners step in slicing and tugging, tossing the heavy wet hides into a heap for the tanner’s boy to haul off in his wheelbarrow, a cloud of flies bursting apart with each new toss and then settling back on top. A man comes in to fog the whole floor three times a day but the flies always come back. The blood-smeared butchers come last, one on each side of the chute, hacking out the cuts they want and dropping them into steel carts, stripping one side of the skinned animal then digging in their meathooks to flip it over and do the other. What is left gets hauled up the ramp, unhooked, and slid into the enormous rendering vat. His first week on the Island Jubal was up there on the catwalk in the heat and the fumes and the smell, but he come on time every day and didn’t complain and didn’t fall in so they moved him to horseshoes and now they got a new colored man at the vat. It is mostly Polacks and Irish here, lots of them with the whole family working. Some of the Polacks speak American, and other ones, like old Woytak who skins the dogs and the raccoons and the fox that come in sometimes, talk old country or don’t talk at all. Mr. Tom says if Jubal does a good job and stays out of trouble on the Island a few more weeks maybe he will put him on a wagon.

His first day up from Wilmington he went to all the stables in the City, telling what he could do and asking for work. There were stables for four horses and stables for twenty and stables for more than a hundred that had three stories with wagons on the ground floor and the horses brought up a ramp to the second and their feed on the top. One place that was for trolley horses had five hundred stalls but the trolley gone electric now and near half of them were empty. Jubal asked and walked and asked and walked, teamsters on the street happy to tell him where to try, but there was no work till he come to the West Side stable for P. White’s Sons and they said they would start him out on Barren Island.

The horses on the streets of the City are all blinkered, as close to blind as you can do and still get them to work. The people don’t look to the sides much either, staring a tunnel down the street and hurrying through it. Wherever he went that first day he was in the way of something, and both times he tried to sit down a police appeared to eyeball him to his feet again. There is places in Wilmington where you got to state your business if you’re colored, but there is also a dozen white men Jubal could say he hauled for, who would stand for him as a honest worker with a feel for the animals.

The room he stays in now is not so big and belongs to P. White’s Sons, like all the other rooms and houses on Barren Island. They built the school and the firehouse and the little grocery and probly own the two saloons that he’s never seen any colored in. Rent comes out of his pay, double for the first week. A small steamer boat, the Fannie McKane, travels over to a place called Canarsie and back two times a day and once for church on Sunday. He hasn’t gone back over yet, his credit good on the Island but nowhere else. They cook garbage here too, at a plant on the other side of the pier, but it pays just the same and there’s no chance to get on a wagon. There is a neighborhood or two in the City where colored live, even some from Carolina, but this is the job for now and if you work here you got to live here.

Halecki steps past pushing a train of carts full of tankage that will be dried and sold for fertilizer. They don’t waste a thing, P. White’s Sons, and the next passel of horses bound for the City will come up grazing on grass grown on their grandaddy’s bones. Some of the horses come in you can tell they broke a leg or got hit by another carriage, but mostly they are old and gray-muzzled and just been worked out. Jubal hooks carcasses and pops horseshoes till one of the Irish who do errands, little Darby, runs up to say there is a load coming in.

Jubal is the only one suppose to come off the line. It is chilly, his breath showing white and the winter wind blowing strong when he steps out of the building, blowing black smoke from the huge brick chimney over to Rockaway and lifting some of the smell away with it. It is not so bad as he worried, kind of a old-coffee thickness in the air that never goes away, and he is used to it by now. A steam tug pushes a scow piled with carcasses across Dead Horse Bay to the pier, the dark hides nearly hidden by a blanket of feeding gulls. Most every carcass Jubal handles is missing at least one eye and he’s come to hate the birds.

No telling how they bring the horses out when the river finally ices over.

Smitty and Pops are waiting with their wagons by the wharf crane, both with a blinkered four-in-hand team. Uncle Wicklow taught him to handle a big team like that when he was in livery for Mr. Sprunt, and once Jubal got to work six mules rolling a house from Queen Street to Market. A mule won’t let you kill him with work, but horses—these ones coming in on the scow probly just got pushed past what they could do, too heavy, too steep, too fast. Driver got to make up for the sense that a horse don’t have, and Jubal has always had a feel for them. Once when they were little and times was hard Mama bought some horsemeat from Honniker and cooked it in a stew. Mama could make a sump-digger’s boot taste good, but Jubal couldn’t touch a bite and Royal laughed at him and ate the whole mess.

“Jubal think he know who this stew is,” he said. “Know the name of every horse in town.”

The gulls stir some when the scow bangs against the pilings and Jubal hops down to tie her up. He kicks at one of the birds that stays too close when he climbs onto the pile of carcasses.

“Got room for you in that renderin tank.”

Hruba who operates the crane sends the tackle down and Jubal gets busy, muscling the first cold body around with his gaff while old Inkspot fixes lines in place and sets the hardware. Inkspot is drunk whenever he’s not working but still moves quick, hopping around the jumble of bodies and legs like a flea, tapping where he wants Jubal to lift, trussing the animal to be lifted. He sits back on the rump of a Cleveland bay and jerks his thumb up at Hruba.

“You got im!”

Half the gulls are still on the pile and half are flapping in the air, looking for an opening. The winch chain rattles till it goes taut and the hooked horse is hoisted straight up, eyeless head flopping to one side, then swung over Smitty’s wagon bed and cranked down. Smitty got his whole team in feedbags for the loading—it could be sacks of concrete coming down for all they know. Some horses will shy at a corpse, but they can be trained around it. Jubal drove Mr. Rivers the undertaker’s matched black Tennessee Walkers for a spell, wearing a top hat that was a mite too big for him, and never had to use an overchuck on them, the horses raising their heads up proud the minute they saw the hearse rolled out. Except for the Phenix fire pumper, that was the finest team in Wilmington, stepping high, pulling even, standing tall. Dignified.

Jubal knows how old a horse is from twenty paces, can feel its legs and tell you is it a lead or a swing or a wheelhorse, can tell you how it’s been hitched and how much it can pull, can riff his fingers in the coat and let you know what kind of feed it’s lacking. But these ones don’t tell much of a story, just dead weight to gaff till old Inky has got the lines fixed and then you move on to the next. Uncle Wick owns a little patch out on the way to Winnabow and sometimes he move an old horse off a team and onto a single-pull and then one day when it isn’t good for even that he put it out on that patch, lets it feed and sleep all day and go rheumy-eyed and ski-footed. Might be four or five of them old horses out there at any time that Uncle say weren’t to be rode.

“That hoss done carry his share of the world,” he would say if Jubal or Royal would ask could they climb up. “Leave him rest now.”

Smitty’s wagon fills and he pulls the feed bags off and puts the bits back in and clucks the team back toward the rendering plant, steam showing out their noses, a few gulls resettling on top. Smitty is good, can dock that rig backward into the loading slot first try every time. Used to run them eight-up for a moving company, he says, till it was bought by a bigger company that wanted all white horses and all white drivers.

Jubal gaffs a broke-legged pony and rolls it back for Inkspot. The pony has been shot in the head and has a pinto hide, which the skinners always put away special. Be on somebody’s easy chair in no time. Jubal looks over to Brooklyn while the old man kneels by the pony with lines in hand. It is part of Greater New York now, part of the City. Word is that the colored man’s future is up here, even if won’t nobody look you straight in the eye.

“You just don’t stop movin, is what,” old Inkspot told him the first night in the room they share, his breath sharp with whiskey. “You stop movin, black or white, you gets throwed in the pot.”

How many horses there must be over there, for this many to come in dead every day? Every one of them horses need caring for, feeding, somebody who know how to work them. It only makes sense. This the place for me, Jubal thinks as the pony is hoisted and swings upside down next to him for a moment. I just got in on the wrong end of it.

With a piano she could give lessons. Or even just to play for Mother and Father at night. Jessie has read the bulletins posted at the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera and at the Carnegie Hall. It is possible that these instructors don’t have a piano in their homes, but they have positions that give them access to one, or money to rent a music room. In this city nothing happens until money passes hands.

Even if they could afford it, of course, a piano is an impossibility in their two crowded rooms. Walls would need to be moved and a crane employed to bring one in, the lopsided stairs too narrow, too weak to bear the weight. The only music she hears now is from the pianola at the corner saloon, drifting up from the street till halfway through the night. Some of the songs are lively but the machine lacks at least a quarter of the notes and depends on the stamina and interest of whoever is pumping the pedals, and the saloon keeper insists on having his rolls played in the same order every night. If the neighborhood is being graced with Hello, Mah Baby it is a quarter past seven.

Jessie has passed the women before, standing in the cold under the elevated tracks on Ninth just north of Paddy’s Market, arms folded, chatting in small groups, waiting to be picked up. At first, unsure of their business on the street, she walked by pretending they weren’t there, but eventually began to nod politely and respond to their questions and listen to their suggestions. She has solicited as far south as Park Row and as far north as 80th Street, venturing all the way to the East River once to see about a position in a laundry. She has learned that the shops on the Ladies’ Mile do not hire colored girls to meet the public, and that most of the small manufacturing concerns employ workers who speak the same language as the floor managers. She has learned to hide rather than reveal her education when seeking a position as a domestic, and she has learned, in her two torturous half-days of employment, that she can neither cook nor sew. She has been left more than once outside an employment-agency door while dozens of white women were ushered past her and discovered how long a lady can sit alone resting her legs at a park bench before attracting unwelcome attention. It is not more than a few minutes.

“Is there a line for me to put myself at the end of?” she asks Alberta, the friendliest of the colored girls, who says she is from Charleston.

“Naw, honey, you just stan out here like the rest of us. If they like what they see they ask you over, then you make a deal and get in.”

“Sometimes they remember if they had you before,” says her friend Clarice. “Sometimes they want to look at your hands or hear you say your name or there’s a uniform you got to fit into.”

There is Alberta and Clarice and Queen, who is big and looks angrily at everyone, then an Irish woman called Wee Kate who doesn’t stop talking and four other Irish girls who listen to her and then two dark-haired girls who speak something Jessie doesn’t recognize, all of them standing in the dirty slush beneath the rattling trolleys waiting for someone to pick them up.

“They’ve been hiring to cover baseballs across the river,” says Wee Kate. “Hand stitching. It pays by the piece, but an able girl can do well for herself.”

“Ye’ve done it?” asks Sorcha, one of her listeners.

Wee Kate looks insulted. “Let them transport me to New Jersey? Of course not.”

“Then what does it have to do with us?”

“Only that there’s opportunities available, is all. Ye only have to put yerself forward.”

A white man with a stubble of beard rattles up in an old omnibus that has seen better days. There are five women already inside, staring out the windows at them.

“I need three more,” he says, and Jessie is left standing, the others all rushing forward. Two of the Irish girls climb on first and Wee Kate has a foot on the rung before Queen shoulders her out of the way and falls heavily into the final seat.

“That’s three,” she calls and the unshaven man, who has not turned to watch them, flicks his reins and the omnibus jerks away.

“Fecking black whoor,” grumbles Wee Kate, watching the vehicle rattle south toward the Market. “I’ll deal with her tomorrow.”

Jessie feels short of breath though she hasn’t moved from the spot.

“They didn’t ask what the pay was,” she says.

Alberta shrugs. “The sooner in the day you get started the more you can make.”

“Is it safe?”

“There were three of them, and more in the bus.”

“But if you’re alone—”

“Some girls do,” says Alberta. “Not me.”

Jessie is surprised that no one passing turns to stare at them. They have the snow banks to navigate, of course, and the wind cutting between the tall buildings, but still—if there is a place in Wilmington where women congregate and offer their services she does not know where it is. The two foreign girls are taken after a long conversation with a man who speaks their language and then the remaining six of them wait for what seems like hours. Wagons full of ice and meat and fish and fodder for horses pass by them and the trolleys rumble overhead and an Italian man pushing a cart goes by singing praises to his melons and uniformed servants of various races hurry to and from the Market and once a policeman looks them over but does not say hello.

“It’s the Jews ye have to look out for,” says Wee Kate when she has gotten over her tussle with Queen. “They’ll try to cheat ye out of it every time. And very free with their hands, if ye know what I’m sayin. They can’t help themselves in the presence of a Christian girl, it’s a well-known fact. And it’s them that runs the whole city.”

“And I thought it was the lads at Tammany,” says Sorcha, raising her eyes in an exaggerated way. “Croker and that lot.”

“They’re merely the custodians,” corrects Wee Kate. “It’s your Jews, the bankers and financiers and such, that own the whole shebang.”

The Jews that Jessie has seen so far in the city don’t seem to have much. Mrs. Kastner, who lives below them with her half-crippled son who sits mooning on the stoop, twists colored cloth and wire into flowers from early morning until she blows the candles out at night. A boy who wears the black hat and curls next to his ears comes every morning to take what is finished and bring her more material.

There must be different Jews.

“I was a waiter girl for a time,” says Wee Kate. “At Auchenpaugh’s Beer Garden. Now your Dutchman is tight with the gratuities until he’s poured a couple down his gullet, and then he’s as generous as the next fella. I could carry six steins of lager in each of me hands,” she says, holding her skinny arms out wide and making fists. “More than once I’ve navigated the floor with every Fritz on the East Side crowdin the place, and never spilt a drop. ‘Katie,’ they’d say to me when they was feelin no pain and waxin sentymental, ‘yer a drinkin man’s angel.’ ”

“How come you quit?”

Wee Kate raises her chin at Clarice, looking offended. “I didn’t quit at all. Auchenpaugh comes in one day, cocky as a magpie on a pump handle, and declares that from now on we’re to wear this get-up as a unyform—” she indicates with the side of her hand, “—down to here and up to there. A decent woman wouldn’t be caught dead in it. ‘Tis only the traditional costume in the village that I hail from,’ says Auchenpaugh. So I says, ‘Then, traditionally, yer women is whoors.’ ”

Sorcha keeps her eyes wide. “And he took offense, did he?”

“Thick heads and thin skins, if ye ask me. I don’t have a word of the German, and it’s a lucky thing too from the tone of what he was sputterin. Lost his best waiter girl that very night.”

“So the skirt was small, ye say?” Sorcha winks at the other women.

“Not enough to keep a field mouse warm. It’s all showgirls there now, the ones as can’t get on to wiggle their fannies at the Casino Roof. Arms like pipe cleaners that can barely lift an honest mug of ale, much less six in each hand. Strumpets, is all, and if that’s what the Dutchmen want I’m well rid of em.”

Wee Kate goes on to tell of her trials in a hotel kitchen and sewing undergarments and assembling cardboard boxes and pretending she was an experienced typewriter girl.

“They had me believe I was just to copy what was already there on the page, not to read it and make corrections,” she complains. “It’s been me own Stations of the Cross. An honest girl has nowhere to turn.”

It is nearly noon and Jessie feeling lightheaded from hunger when a drayman with a carbuncle that looks like a raspberry on his nose stops and calls them over to his wagon.

“Easy work,” he says. “Making toys. It pays two dollars a day—only half the day is gone already.”

The women look at each other, then begin to climb in. There are some crates to sit on but by the time Alberta pulls Jessie up these are gone. She sits, awkwardly, on the floor of the wagon bed, holding on to the side. A mismatched pair of horses pull them forward, one bleeding from under its harness. The women bump shoulders and knees as they roll east on 44th Street.

“Will he take us back to the same place at the end of the day?” Jessie asks, and the others laugh. Alberta looks her over.

“You aint brought nothin to eat.”

Jessie shakes her head. Her too-thin coat cannot hide from their eyes that she is several months pregnant. She feels alternately famished and bloated these days and is suddenly prone to headaches. Nobody on the street is even looking at them, a wagon full of women, colored and white, loaded like sacks of grain. Alberta pulls something wrapped in a handkerchief from her waist and unrolls it, breaking off half a corn cake and handing it down to Jessie.

“Eat this here,” she says. “You gone need it.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Yeah,” the dark girl smiles. “I feeds the crumbs to the birdies.”

It is a little stale and there is no butter but it is the best corn cake Jessie has ever eaten.

The building is on 25th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, six stories high, floor-length windows separated into tiny panes by iron mullions. The drayman ties his horses to a light pole and then lets the back gate of the wagon down, stepping back to stare at their legs as they climb onto the street.

“Follow me.”

There is an elevator and a board beside it with the names of different manufactories and the floors they reside on, but the six from Paddy’s Market and two more they gathered on the way are led down creaking wooden stairs to the basement. It takes Jessie’s eyes a moment to adjust. The ceiling is low, with only a few oil lamps hung from the pipes running overhead. A huge boiler dominates the middle of the room, faced by two long benches with stools placed next to them. It is sweltering and smells like food has been stored here recently, cabbage maybe, and the only exit is by the narrow, unsteady stairs. There is no place to hang their coats, so they hurry to pull them off and lay them in a pile on the floor in the corner. Jessie is perspiring already and has to fight back a panic that there is not enough air for everybody to breathe. Eight or nine women are already seated along one of the benches, painting metal figurines.

“All of you take a stool over here,” says the wagon driver. “It don’t matter which one.” He ducks under a lantern to reach the end of the first bench, frowning at several fully painted figurines lined up on a thin metal tray at the end of it.

“You gals been sleeping here, or what?”

None of the working women, who are all white, look up to answer him, faces set in the dim light.

Jessie sits at the empty bench, Alberta on one side of her and Clarice on the other. There is a glass pot of orangey-pink paint in front of her, a small paintbrush lying on a scrap of cardboard beside it. The wooden bench top is gouged and scarred but not spattered with paint like the other that has been in use.

The drayman steps to the head of their bench and picks up one of the metal figurines to wave at them. “I’m only going through this once, so keep your ears open. Anybody here don’t speak English?”

None of the women at the table respond. It occurs to Jessie that if she didn’t speak English she wouldn’t have understood the question.

“All right, this is your basic piece, and each one of youse is going to paint a different part of it. The paint dries fast but not so fast you can’t smudge it up with your hands, so you never pick it up by where the gal before you just painted.”

The figurines are American soldiers, marching men with a rifle over their shoulders. They are bigger than the lead infantrymen Junior played with when he was a boy, nearly a half-foot high. The top of each figure has been dipped in blue, the bottom in a buff color, meeting unevenly at the belt line.

“The base, all around here, is green. Number One, that’s you.”

The drayman walks down the line to point to the section each woman is to paint.

“Number Two, you do the hands and the face with this—don’t get none on the bottom of the hat—and Number Three, you got black for the belt and the boots. Be careful with that damn black, it’s murder to cover up. Four, you got the little brush, that’s brass color for the buttons. Just one little dot on each of em, don’t go crazy with it. Five, the whites of the eyes. Six, dark brown for the hair and eyebrows and the rifle, Seven, a dab of blue in the center of each eye—don’t fill the whole thing up—and Eight,” he has reached the end of the bench, “you do the hat light brown and line the pieces up on the tray here. I want them facing the same way and none of them touching. Now do we all know our colors?”

Jessie thinks that to make a figurine of the drayman they’d need a pot of red for the berry on his nose. He slaps the top of the bench with his hand.

“You mess it up, stick the wrong color in the wrong place, just put it aside on the table and keep the line going. You’ll have to fix those later. Let’s get cracking.”

He hands Alberta the figurine and goes to the stairs, turning back to glare at them just before he starts up.

“Oh yeah—I come back and catch any one of you flapping your gums—you’re out. No pay, no nothin.” He taps his temple with a finger. “A word to the wise.”

They begin to paint. Alberta has a wider brush and slaps the green onto the base sloppily, so it is dripping when she hands it to Jessie. None of the oil lamps is directly overhead and it is hard to see, but she does her best with her brush. The figurines are hollow cast iron, molded with great detail. Her paint is light but doesn’t look like any skin color she’s ever seen when it goes on. She used to love painting eggs with Mother at Easter and has done watercolors for years, but something about this makes her anxious.

“I’ve got the hardest task by far,” mutters Wee Kate, squinting as she lines a soldier’s eyebrows with brown. “The bastard done it on purpose.”

“Shut up with ye,” says Sorcha. “Ye’ll earn us all the sack.”

Jessie has passed five pieces on to Clarice when a skinny white boy steps out from around the boiler carrying a tray with a dozen of the finished soldiers on it, all the colors, especially the skin, looking better now. He is wearing gloves and a sweat-soaked undershirt, quickly unloading the figurines into a crate painted on the side with a similar-looking soldier standing in front of a giant American flag. He takes a tray of painted men from the end of the first bench and hurries back behind the boiler.

“He’ll have an oven back there,” announces Wee Kate. “To bake the color on.”

The women continue to paint, silently. Jessie already has green stains on her sleeves and wishes she had worn a different waist today. She does the neck and face first, not worrying if it overlaps with the hairline, then takes more time with the hands, careful of the blue uniform cuffs. If it wasn’t for the low ceiling and the smell and the heat from the boiler and the unforgivingly hard seat of the stool it wouldn’t be the worst of occupations.

Another man comes down, this one tall enough to have to bend over to fit under the pipes, and stands behind them, watching.

“Jesus Horatio Christ,” he says finally, kicking the back of Wee Kate’s chair. “You’re sposed to paint the damn things, not play with them!”

He stomps, stooped over, to stand in front of them. He has bloodshot eyes and long, crooked teeth, and his breath smells like his lunch when he starts to shout into their faces.

“You people got half a day to give me a hundred fifty pieces. Didn’t he tell you that? You don’t make one-fifty, nobody gets paid!”

“Ye’ve given me three things to paint,” says Wee Kate, holding up the soldier she is working on, and then nodding toward Sorcha beside her, “and this one has only got to spot the feckin eyes on it.”

“You don’t like your job,” says the tall man, raising his eyebrows, “you know where the stairs are.”

Wee Kate thunks the soldier down on the bench top and angrily jabs her brush at it.

“And the same goes for you!” he shouts at the women at the other bench before clumping away up the stairs.

“There’s a Jew for ye,” mutters Wee Kate when he’s gone.

Jessie has no idea if the man is a Jew or not, but the threat of not being paid puts a frantic energy into their work, Jessie perspiring, her brush hand beginning to cramp, and a dull pain is forming behind her eyes. A few of the women still have food with them and hurry a few bites in between soldiers. How they can stomach anything with the cabbage smell and the heat—

Jessie is aware that she needs to relieve herself. Nothing has been spoken of this, and she looks around desperately. No sign of a convenience. She paints a few more pieces, resolving to put it out of her mind. But the problem is not in her mind. She is barely keeping up with Alberta, but it can’t wait.

“M’am,” she says, turning to a woman behind her at the other bench, a woman with a touch of gray in her hair, “excuse me, but—”

“Past the boiler, on the left,” says the woman without looking up from her work.

“Now ye’ve sunk us,” snarls Wee Kate, who has three soldiers lined up waiting for her attentions as Jessie hurries past.

It is only a closet, with a toilet of sorts and a single candle for light, the ceiling open around a thick pipe that runs upstairs. She hurries through her business, holding her breath against the smell for as long as she can. There are footsteps above, and then the voices of the wagon driver and the tall man.

“It’s all that was left,” says the drayman.

“I told you before—”

“You want all white, you got to send me out earlier.”

“How am I supposed to know half of em don’t come back?”

“And what’s the difference?”

“Campbell rents the room,” says the tall man, “and he don’t want niggers in the building. That’s the difference.”

Jessie is suffocating in the closet. She arranges her clothing and steps out to see the skinny young man carefully stoop to slide a tray of soldiers into the mouth of an oven standing on stout legs near the back wall, a brazier filled with glowing coals beneath it. He turns and holds her eye for a long moment.

“You don’t want to be here,” he says sadly, and then turns back to his work.

“Here’s our ladyship, come back for a visit,” says Wee Kate, but none of the others even look up. Alberta is finishing the face on a piece for Jessie, and hands back her brush.

“Thank you,” says Jessie, sitting into her spot. There is no clock in the basement, and without a window there is no way to know how much time has passed.

“You do it for me when I gots to go,” says Alberta.

Jessie begins to paint again, head and hands, head and hands. If this were a novel, she thinks, the Dark and Brooding Man would appear at the bottom of those stairs to sweep her into his arms and carry her away. He would have vanquished those who ruined Father, restored their fortune and their home. The women left behind in the basement would be stirred by the scene, and Wee Kate, a tear in her eye, would have an appropriate and sentimental comment to put a cap on the story.

But then she is not the Wronged Heroine, honest and stalwart. She is the Fallen Woman, the lass alluded to as a caution to flighty girls, the one who through her own fecklessness and perfidy has earned her fate.

Jessie has to struggle to keep the soldier she is holding in focus. Her head is swimming. If this is the influenza, how will it affect the life growing within her? How will she not pass it on to her parents living in the cramped quarters of their apartment? She feels flushed, light-headed, she feels—ashamed. That is what she feels most acutely. What would Junior say, or Father, if they saw her here, doing this work for these men? Or Royal, if he ever overcame his rightful anger to look at her again?

Junior’s infantrymen were Union soldiers, and he fought the battle of New Bern over and over with them, using clothespins to represent the Confederates. They were all white men in blue, set in various poses, and he would erect battlements of dirt in the backyard or in the coach house when it was raining, making the noises of rifle and artillery fire and the occasional cry of a wounded man. Jessie remembers how heavy they were for the size of them, barely able to lift the box that Junior kept under his bed for years.

She wonders who is living in their house in Wilmington now. They will be white people, of course, and she wonders if they have a daughter who sits dreamily at her piano, if they have a small boy who plays in the carriage barn with lead soldiers whose blue uniforms he has painted gray—

Jessie stands shakily, takes a few steps and dips her brush into Wee Kate’s paint pot.

“Christ Almighty, what’re ye up to now?”

Jessie steps back to her place and quickly paints a soldier with brown face and hands, then sets it in front of Clarice. Clarice looks at her, giggles and starts to paint the hair and eyebrows black. The figurine moves down the line. Jessie dips her brush back into her own pot, but there is still some brown on it and this one comes out closer to Junior’s shade.

The first was more like Royal Scott.

The next one she paints might be an Italian.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” exclaims Wee Kate when the figurines reach her. “Have ye gone mad?”

“I done the rest for you,” says Clarice. “You just paint that rifle and pass em on.”

When the skinny boy takes them away on the tray he says nothing, nor when he returns and crates them with the color baked on.

Head and hands, head and hands, head and hands. Figurines pass down the line of women who have become one long, many-armed creature that occasionally sighs but does not speak. At some point each of the women excuses herself, even Wee Kate, the slack taken up by the others and the flow of pieces uninterrupted. Once, when she was little, Father let her come with him to treat a man injured at the cotton press, found her a safe place to stand and watch the gang at work. At first it was the sound that terrified her, steam exploding to drive the heavy metal press down onto the loose bales, the big, sweating men shouting at each other over the clank and grind of machine parts. But as she watched, the noise and confusion began to fall into a pattern—men hoisting bales up from the wagons with a pulley, dankeymen pushing them along a slide to the mouth of the press where the snatchers cut the ropes away and shoved them in onto the huge metal teeth and the leverman pulling the arm to trigger the press down and back up and then the tyers pushing metal bands through the teeth and then pulling them over to fasten them snug around the tight-pressed bale and jumping away when the press kicked the bale out with its tongue to slide down the chute onto the back of another wagon. And all through it the caller—singing out instructions, sometimes even riding on top of the press itself to see the entirety of the operation, nearly disappearing into the hole as the press hammered down.

Ready when you hear me call—

—he sang—

Pull that stick and let her fall!

Limbs, bodies, heads moving out of the way just in time not to be destroyed by the monstrous works—

Haul the next one when you able

Put the bacon on you table!

And the men singing back now and then, never taking their eyes off the machinery—

Won’t be liquor, won’t be sin

Cotton gone to do me in!

It was thrilling and terrifying and she felt a mixture of awe and pity for the men working there, a sadness to their labor that she thought at the time was due to their fellow worker having his leg crushed that morning, due to the danger and the deafening bursts of steam and the heat and having to breathe the cotton lint kicked up and filling the air till you were coughing, coughing without a hand free to cover your mouth, coughing blood sometimes and spitting it out onto the hot metal beast. But now she understands that it is not the work itself, so much harder and more dangerous than her own, of course, but the repetition, the repetition of the work that is nightmarish. The same process, the same motions over and over, day after day, year after year, knowing the job will not change, that it is waiting for you, impatient, demanding, insatiable, and that this is all that life will ever have to offer you. Jessie tries to become an automaton, to drive complaint from her head and to make her motions as efficient and mechanical as possible. She tries to count the pieces as they pass through her hands, hoping to mark time with the sum, but twice loses track just past thirty.

At the end her eyes are dry and smarting, the headache settled just behind them, and the brush is trembling slightly in her hand. The tall man has been down twice to check on their progress, shaking his head and muttering, and finally there are no more figurines left to paint. The skinny boy climbs the stairs, carrying a crate full of finished pieces, and promises to tell the men that they’re done.

“Are ye here all the time?” Wee Kate asks the women at the next table, who are all standing and trying to straighten their backs.

“A few of us were in yesterday,” answers the woman with the gray in her hair. “I think they set up in different places whenever they get a contract.”

“I made dolls once,” says another. “Stuck the hair in their heads. Pay was the same but at least we had a window.”

“Oh, I done worse,” says the older woman. “I done plenty worse.”

The tall man comes down with a cloth sack and begins to pay the women at the first table their two dollars, most of it in coins. When it is Jessie’s turn he gives her a pair of Columbian half dollars, the ones with the explorer’s ship on top of two globes on one side and his face on the other. Junior has a collection of them. Had.

“Don’t bother coming tomorrow,” the tall man says to her.

Jessie holds the two coins tightly in her hand, rubbing them together, as she pulls her coat back on and follows the other women up the stairs and out through the lobby into the street. It is almost dark now, big flakes of snow falling lazily between the high buildings, and cold.

“Where you live?” Alberta asks her.

“On 47th, just west of Eighth,” she says. It is the third apartment they have lived in, and if she can find steady work they won’t be there long.

Alberta nods at Clarice. “We walk you far as 39th.”

As they are leaving she sees the skinny boy and the drayman loading crates onto the wagon. Her soldiers are in there somewhere, she thinks, no telling where they’re headed.

New York is a machine with too many parts. Harry braces himself on the ice-slick sidewalk, a flood of bodies rushing past on either side of him, attempting to decipher the intermeshing rhythm of its gears, the design, if any, of its incessant motion and counter-motion. He has cranked his way through every clamshell Mutoscope in lower Manhattan, harem girls and saucy parlor maids up to their customary antics, has thrilled to the Roosevelt Rough Riders thundering off the screen at Proctor’s Pleasure Palace, mourned The Burial of the Maine Victims and marveled over Mules Swimming Ashore at Daiquiri at Koster and Bials, suffered through an interminable and decidedly unfunny comic opera at Keith’s Union Square to witness the Cuban Ambush on their celebrated “warscope” and eaten a hamburger sandwich at a counter with fellow lunchers’ elbows digging into him from both sides.

A tiny newsboy with yellowish skin starts across from the other side of 23rd, disappearing behind careening carriages and screeching trolley cars but sauntering yet, unconcerned, when they have passed, till he stands at Harry’s side tugging at the sleeve of his new heavy coat and raising plaintive eyes.

“ REBELS ATTACK MANILA, Mister. Read all about it.”

“No thank you.” The boy is peddling Hearst’s sensational Journal.

“Two cents, fer cryin out loud. How can you go wrong?”

The boy looks unwell, malnourished at the least, possibly contagious. Harry tightens his grip on his cane, takes a sidestep away. “You aren’t allowed to read this scandal sheet, are you?”

The boy makes a disagreeable face. “I look at the pitchers. You got a problem widdat?”

Harry gives him a weak smile, steps off the curb.

“On Sunday they got em in colors.”

He makes his cautious dash then, using the cane to push off on his shortleg side, narrowly evading the wheels of a rattling landau, and finally gaining the broad, recently shoveled front steps of the Eden Musee.

The building is steep-roofed and ornate in the French Renaissance style, statuary perched on decorative stone ledges, stairs leading to three high-arched entryways. Harry pays his dime to the young lady in the kiosk and waits for his heart to stop thumping before venturing on to the exhibits.

“The Passion has already started,” she informs him. “They’re probly up to Palm Sunday.”

The clientele in the Musee are more genteel than in Proctor’s or Keith’s or the Huber Museum, well-dressed ladies perusing the tableaux with their young ones, gentlemen in bowlers and ties, no crush of workmen and street urchins popping in here for a quick and prurient thrill.

“There will be a display of sleight-of-hand in the Egyptian Room at four o’clock,” adds the kiosk girl.

The first grouping of figures depicts President Lincoln at his famous Gettysburg Address. The tall wax figure, bearded and hatless with the suggestion of a stiff wind in his hair, gestures nobly with one hand, the handwritten speech clutched in the other, flanked by a pair of Union soldiers with rifles at port-arms while a half-dozen onlookers stand at the foot of the platform in attitudes of reverent attention. The eyes are dark and deep-set as in the Brady photographs, but there is no light of life in them.

“—that from these honored dead—” drones a hound-eyed older man dressed in a ’60s mourning cloak who stands beside the tableau with hand over heart, “—we take increased devotion to that cause which they here have thus far so nobly carried on—”

Harry moves on, the unalloyed yankeeness of it giving him a guilty twinge. “A freak of Nature,” the Judge was wont to say of the North’s martyred saint. “Malformed and malignant.”

He wonders how many times a day the man must repeat the speech. Perhaps a phonograph recording of it would be more effective, not placed so it seems to be coming from the motionless figure, but amplified from above, like a voice from the Great Beyond. Harry has already worked out a mechanism whereby a spectator’s foot triggers the phonograph and is pondering the nature of sound waves when he wanders into the execution of Marie Antoinette.

“—this moment, when my troubles are about to end, is not when I need courage, Father,” recites an acne-scarred youth in peasant garb. “And with that the lethal drumroll began—”

A tumbrel filled with filthy straw and doomed nobles, a long-faced curée intoning from his open Bible, the buxom Marie with her hair shorn, hands tied behind her back, kneeling with neck stretched out over the block, the sans culottes, faces distorted as they jeer from every side—there is a sudden skreek of metal and the heavy blade falls in its slot—CHOK! neatly separating the Queen from her head! There are screams and cries from the flesh-and-blood spectators and one young lady in lavender quite close to Harry swoons and is caught in the arms of a man who might be either her husband or her father.

“French degenerates,” mutters the man, legs bowing under the weight of his charge as he fans her with an orchestra program.

Harry hurries past the other gatherings—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Moses parting the Red Sea, a rather grisly evocation of one of Jack the Ripper’s attacks—waxen, three-dimensional versions of a Kodak snap and in that way inferior, no matter what their subject, to the moving actualities he’s just seen in the variety halls. Harry is about to climb the stairs to the Concert Hall when he hears a familiar voice boom out through the open door of a workroom.

“If you don’t hurry with this I’m going to suffocate!”

Looking in, Harry sees a man seated on a workbench, his face completely obscured by plaster bandages, while another man painstakingly pries the cast away from the skin with a metal instrument coated with petroleum jelly.

“Mr. Teethadore?”

“Who’s that?” The voice, even somewhat muffled behind the appendage, is deep and resonant.

“We met in Wilmington. After a performance.”

“You find me at a disadvantage.”

Harry takes a step into the room. There are white wax heads, nearly featureless, lined up on a shelf, historical costumes hanging on a pipe and torsos made of wire. “Are you all right?”

“Having my mug reproduced. It seems that General Custer shall soon be hors de combat from his Last Stand exhibit and donating the better portion of himself—body, hands, flashing saber—to our noted Rough Rider.”

“It seems to be stuck somewhere,” says the other man, gently pulling on the mold.

“If I lose so much as a hair from an eyebrow,” says Teethadore, raising a finger, “there shall be dire consequences.”

“You said I should come see you,” ventures Harry with what he hopes is an ironic lilt in his drawl. “If I ever came to New York.”

“And you’ve followed me here?”

The recent disturbance in Wilmington seems too complicated, too tawdry to mention. “Actually I came for the views. This is something of a Mecca—”

“Foreign subjects. Very uplifting. Celluloid novelties for the carriage trade.”

“It’s really the camera that I—”

“Of course. I remember you now—waxing poetic over the mysteries of the projection device. Drat!”

“I’m sorry,” says the wax sculptor. “I told you to shave your moustache.”

In Wilmington the actor’s moustache had been applied with spirit gum. “No use dragging the character onto the street with me,” he’d said then. “It’s enough to portray the little runt on the boards.” But that had been before the San Juan Hill.

Harry watches uncomfortably as the sculptor wiggles the plaster this way and that, trying to loosen it.

“It was very nice to see you,” he says finally.

“You shall see me, my friend, when this moulage is removed from my face and not before. I suggest you go up and watch the other fellow suffer a bit. It’s quite a presentation.”

When Harry steps away the sculptor has taken up a hammer and chisel and seems about to do something drastic.

He slips quickly into the rear of the hall, a few patrons looking back with annoyance at the intrusion of light. The seats are all full. On the screen, Christ carries a huge wooden cross past idlers and loose women, a pair of spear-carrying Roman soldiers trailing behind Him. There is bright sunlight above and a backdrop painted with the stone buildings of Jerusalem, but this cannot be what they’ve advertised out front. The Oberammergau Passion, Harry knows, is staged once every ten years, and the equipment to photograph motion did not exist at the time of the last performance. Christ falters, catching himself with one hand. The soldiers snatch Simon of Cyrene from the crowd and force him to shoulder the cross for a moment. Finally, after much prodding with spear tips and flogging, Christ exits the right side of the screen, the rough wooden post dragging behind, the mob turning to jeer his passing. The moving image fades in brightness, immediately replaced by a lantern view, a hand-tinted diapositive of El Greco’s Christ Carrying the Cross. It is one of Harry’s favorites, angled as if the painter were on his knees when the Nazarene passed, his eyes fixed on the hill above, dark sky brooding behind him.

“Imagine the weight of it,” intones a white-haired gentleman wearing a pince-nez, his head barely peeking over the lectern set up beside the screen. “Imagine the rough stones underfoot, the scourge of the Roman whips, the raucous contempt of those who, only days before, had waved the palms of peace and cheered your entry into the city.”

Harry is aware of a man standing next to him in the darkness at the rear, a man nodding vigorously as the lecturer continues.

“Are these the souls He has come to save, these torturers, these blood-thirsty, mocking Jews and Philistines?”

The El Greco fades into a new still image, this the circular Bosch painting with the turbaned Pilate at the left, the soldier reaching to wrench Him away, the potato-faced onlookers. These men do look like German peasants, rough and primitive.

“ ‘Ecce homo,’ the Roman judge pronounces,” continues the lecturer. “See the man. Not the Messiah, not their Lord and Savior, but simply a man. This, we now understand, was the greatest degradation of all. Humble as He was, this was the only Son of God brought to His knees before the dregs of humanity, beaten and reviled, driven, at last, to Calvary.”

Harry can hear several women in the audience begin to weep as the Bosch is replaced by a moving view. Three crosses, three crucified men, low hills in the background, a tall palm to the right, the centurions crouched below, throwing dice upon the ground and laughing. The shadows of the crosses are visible on the backdrop sky, of course, and no breeze stirs the painted palm fronds, but there are gasps and outcries in the hall when one of the Romans thrusts his spear into Christ’s ribs, and then a sigh of wonder as He lifts His eyes one last time to Heaven before letting His head drop in death. A golden nimbus, some sort of dye-process, no doubt, spreads from His body and suddenly a choir, previously unseen, is lit on the other side of the screen, a dozen angelic voices singing When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and it is then that Harry has his revelation. What drives the picture forward, the vital armature, could at the same time drive some phonographic device in synchrony with the celluloid. Not only could this holy music be joined to the film strip, but His dying words, “Lord, hath Thou forsaken me?,” audibly delivered by the actor portraying Christ as if he were in the room.

Or is this sacrilege?

The man who stands beside him has joined in the singing, a rich, full basso—

His dying crimson, like a robe

Spreads o’er His body on the tree

Then I am dead to all the globe

And all the globe is dead to me!

The moving view gives way to a lantern-slide of Rembrandt’s moody Descent from the Cross, Joseph of Arimathea hugging the Body as he descends the ladder, Mary swooning into sympathetic arms in her own golden patch of light. The choir finishes the song, softening their voices into mournful oohs and aahs as the professor intones once more.

“There is, of course, a simple human side to our story,” he says. “That of a mother’s love for her Son.”

The Rembrandt gives way to the final moving view, the Pietà staged before the same backdrop. The thieves still hang on either side, the Roman soldiers gone now, replaced by nascent Christians who watch in sorrow as Mary clutches His thorn-crowned head to her breast. Harry can’t help wishing they had moved the camera closer so that the Virgin’s face could be seen, wishes he could walk into the view to comfort her.

“A mother’s grief knows no bounds,” says the lecturer. “But we can take comfort, we can find solace, in this story. For the Lord God on high loved us so much,” and here the projectionist, for it must be his hand, causes the image on the screen to begin to glow and then brighten further to a blinding whiteness as the voices of the choir climb to an almost unbearable crescendo, “that He gave His only begotten Son that we might be saved!”

The electric house lights flash on then and there is stunned, then uproarious applause.

“What did you think?”

It is the man beside him, dark-haired, with an intense, hawklike face.

“Very powerful,” says Harry. “But it can’t be Oberammergau.”

The man smiles. “A ruse to deflect the protestations of clergymen,” he says, offering his hand. “Such as myself. Reverend Thomas Dixon.”

“Harold Manigault.” Harry shakes the preacher’s hand. “You had no objection?”

“On the contrary. I’ve hosted a similar production at my church down the street, though I must admit our moving views were not as—as sumptuous as these.”

“I wonder, though, if the spectacle does not overwhelm—”

“We are poised to enter a century of light, my friend.” He grips Harry’s arm and looks deep into his eyes. “This—” nodding toward the screen, “—this in the proper hands will move men’s souls. I detect that you are of my home section.”

“Wilmington.”

“Goldsboro, in the Piedmont,” smiles the reverend. “And I pastored in Raleigh for a year.” He leans close, lowering his voice conspiratorially as his eyes move over the departing audience. “Some rather propitious events have taken place in your lovely city.”

Harry looks around—the room is nearly empty of spectators but it feels close. “Unfortunate events—”

“I am something of a novelist, in addition to my efforts from the pulpit, and your Wilmington situation strikes me as one of those instances in which history does not need to be greatly modified to instruct us. There is a great lesson to be learned.”

“And what might that be?” Harry asks.

Dixon regards him with a hot gleam in his eye. “That corruption unaddressed will fester,” he says. “And that the leopard, no matter how one paints him, does not change his spots.”

Harry tries to approximate the carefree grin that Niles would use. “What a pity—I’ve been hoping to change my own.”

Dixon pats Harry’s arm as he would to comfort a child, and starts away with an indulgent smile on his lips. “Breeding will out, I’m afraid.” He pauses in the doorway and spreads his arms as if to indicate all of New York. “Where better to bring our struggle than to the belly of the beast?”

Harry is sitting alone when Teethadore, face raw from scrubbing, comes to join him.

“Did you get here for Salome’s dance?”

“I’m afraid I missed it.”

“Charming girl. Travels with a sister act, the Singing Simpsons, but she’s the only one who hasn’t had her knees glued together. Did you see me?”

“In this?” Harry finds it unsettling to think of the diminutive variety artist rubbing elbows with the Savior.

“Herod’s minion, Elder of Zion, St. Matthew, Pilate’s clerk, bad Samar-itan—I’m all over the thing. The days we spent on that rooftop—”

“And Christ—?”

“Splendid fellow. Long-suffering. He and those thieves were strung up there for hours, waiting for the clouds to open. I suppose you’ll want to examine the device?”

“Do you think that would be possible?”

Teethadore gives him the smile and a wink. “The operator is an old friend.”

A youngish man named Porter is blowing air from a bellows into the workings of the cinematograph as they enter.

“The hero of Santiago,” he observes.

“Merely his theatrical counterpart,” grins Teethadore. “I bring you a worshipper at the altar of celluloid.”

Harry nods but can barely take his eyes off the machine. It is even smaller than he imagined.

“This is the French model?”

“Greatly modified,” says Porter. “This can’t double as a camera.”

“The image was so smooth.”

“Thank you.” Porter gives the crank a whirl. “Two revolutions per second.”

Harry looks out through the small window toward the screen. “You watch the view as it’s projected—”

“Only the edge of the screen, I’m afraid. We’ve improved the pull-down claws quite a bit but she’ll still jump around on you. Nothing like that mess Biograph uses.”

“I witnessed some this morning.” Harry puts his hand on his stomach. “Still queasy.”

“Did you notice the odor?”

“There’s an odor?”

Porter pokes at Teethadore. “From this fellow’s acting. For whom, I believe, the term rank amateur was coined.”

“Touché. Mr. Porter is a photographer as well. We have toiled together in the wilds of New Jersey.”

“Gramps Gets Hosed. You can catch it on the Bowery.”

The apparatus is dark metal and glossy wood, mounted on a sturdy tripod. Harry fights the urge to put his hands on it. This is closer to the thing, to the intricate, holy apparatus, than he has hoped to come—

“Mr. Porter,” he ventures, “if you were ever to hear of a place, of an opening within the—”

“Edison’s always looking for new lackeys,” says the projectionist, rewinding a strip of celluloid onto a spool. “I can give you a name.”

Harry holds the folded slip of paper with the name written on it in his hand, thrust safely into his jacket pocket, as he crosses back through the maze of waxen statuary. He pulls up short at the French Revolution, a young cleaning woman on her knees scrubbing what looks like vomitus from the floor.

“Oh my,” says Harry, stepping back from the spreading puddle of wash water. “Someone’s been ill.”

“We get one or two every day when the Missus loses her head,” says the girl. She is Irish, and when she glances up she has the brightest, clearest green eyes Harry has ever seen.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s none of yer fault, is it?”

“I meant—that you have to deal with it.”

She looks up at him again, cocking her head, then she indicates the bloodstain painted on the guillotine block and the floor around it.

“And wasn’t it a poor girl like meself had to mop up that mess after the killin was done?”

“You work here?”

“At the moment, yes.” She goes back to scrubbing.

“Have you seen the attraction in the Hall?”

“The death of Christ? No, I haven’t, as a fact. But I know the story well.”

Of course she would. Harry resists the impulse to hand her a dime, not knowing how the gesture would be received. “Have you ever seen a moving view?”

The young woman sits up on her knees. She has a breathtaking smile. “Ah, I love the fillums, I do, but I rarely have the money nor the time. They take my breath away.”

He feels a little dizzy and wonders if the hamburger was a miscalculation. “Do you think,” he asks, once she has turned her head back to her task, “you might like to attend a show with me some time?”

The eyes grow sharp. “Yer foolin with me.”

“I assure you I’m not.” He lifts his skimmer off. “My name is Harry Manigault. I’m very new in this city—”

“Brigid,” she says, still suspicious. “It’s another name in Irish but here they call me Brigid.”

“May I call for you?”

“Fer that ye’d need to know where I’m situated. Number and street.”

Harry flushes, in deep now and not sure how to get out of it. “I suppose I would.”

“And what would ye think of a girl who told that to a man who’d just stumbled upon her workin?”

He hadn’t thought of that, with her on her knees in bucket water, an immigrant. A scrubwoman. He wonders if he could ever capture those eyes, not the color of course, but the brightness, the life of them, in a photograph.

“Quite right.”

What would Niles say? Even if he didn’t mean it, he would have something.

“Perhaps I could return at closing time and escort you—”

“My work is just beginnin then. It’s only me and the wax heroes, havin a grand time together.”

“Ah.”

She watches him for a moment with her green eyes. “Sunday afternoons,” she says finally, “I’ve been known to pop into the Hippodrome on Houston Street. A persistent gentleman might find me there. By accident, ye might say.”

“A most happy accident.” He puts his lid back on, then tips it to her. “A pleasure making your acquaintance, Miss Brigid.”

“And where do ye come from, Mr. Mannygalt?”

“North Carolina.”

“Right,” she nods sagely. “I had ye spotted fer a foreigner. Twas a pleasure makin yer acquaintance as well,” she says, raising her scrub brush, “considerin the circumstances.”

Harry tries to walk as steadily as he can around the wet spot, not using the cane till he reaches the stairs outside. The cold hits him like a fist, still a surprise. It is night now, the streetlights glowing. He stands on the walk in front of the Eden Musee, the folded paper forgotten in his pocket, slightly dizzy. His heart is racing again, and he hasn’t even started across 23rd Street.