The cage was empty. When my father lost his old job laying railroad ties he blamed our yellow bird, said it brought bad luck, and he let the creature loose in the trees, even though we’d had it for years. My mother cried and put the cage in a crawl space under the roof, up with the suitcases and blankets she and Pa carried for the months they spent on the boat coming over. When Pa saw me with the cage he asked what I was doing. I told him and he said, “Remember where you bury it and cover it with leaves or they’ll see the fresh-dug dirt and go in after it.” And then he said, “Take care of it, lad, and it’ll take care of you.”
When I came back from burying the cage Pa was sitting vigil with Ma and he said to me, “Go see Lizzie.” I went down to our room and saw she was gone from us. Pa had put a rosary in her hand but it hadn’t helped her. I looked at her awhile and went up to Pa’s room and sat with him while Ma shivered and wailed. I heated the hot-water jars for her and rubbed her with Spirits of Camphor but that didn’t do any good either.
After she died Pa never shed a tear, but his face went loose. He couldn’t control its blinking and twitching, or keep the whiteness off it, or banish its shapeless grief. He went to get the priest because Ma was close with the church. She used to go to Mass three or four mornings a week, whenever the weather was good. She loved the religion and was good friends with the pastor. But Pa found out the pastor was sick himself from visiting so many people with the plague, so he only brought back Jigger Kiley and his wagon, which was the hearse on our street that month. Pa said there wouldn’t be any Mass or funeral for Ma just now. Maybe later. Then he took himself to bed and let himself be sick all the way. I sat vigil with him, doing the same useless things I did for Ma, until he, too, shivered and died without a word.
I went and got Emmett Daugherty, and he came back with his own wagon and helped me pack the things he said were valuable and the things I wanted to keep. We locked up the house and got in Jigger’s wagon with Pa, and we dropped Pa off at the new body depository near the arsenal, because that was the law. The old Dead House out at the Almshouse couldn’t handle so many corpses. The rats were eating them before workers got them into their graves.
I went to stay with Emmett at his house beside the canal and live out the summer and winter there. I cried a good deal over my sister and my lost parents and I stopped going to church. I couldn’t abide it anymore, all the talk about Christ. I liked Christ fine, but who didn’t? I felt like that stranger who didn’t believe the preacher’s talk about sin. I didn’t know what to make of things, but I knew I had to do something for myself, that I had no more time to be a child. And so in the spring of ’8, when Emmett heard that a canaler named Masterson needed a helper, I asked for the job and got it, because I couldn’t live off the Daughertys forever. Emmett’s niece was about to arrive from Ireland, and Emmett himself was still ailing with the lung trouble he’d picked up on a land-buying expedition with Lyman Fitzgibbon, the merchant-scientist.
I thanked Emmett for all his help, for saving me from God knows what, for being as close as blood. He said I was welcome anytime and he’d keep my things till I wanted them, and then I went off to work on the canal with Masterson for four of the worst months of my life. He beat me like a mutt and refused to pay me wages. I ran off when I saw how to get away clean, and I found work on John the Brawn’s boat for three months till it sank. Then John bought the skiff and we worked the river out of Albany as ferrymen and haulers, water rats who’d go anywhere with anything between Albany, Troy, West Troy, and Greenbush.
One day on our river I saw you step into Carrick’s boat and saw the boat hit by an ice floe. We put out to rescue you, I saved you from drowning, and that’s how we met. My life was used to subtractions, not additions of beauty the likes of yours.
Maud, I send love.
When I reached Schenectady I asked a stagecoach driver for a ride, since I had no money to ride the train. The driver, for helping him load baggage, let me ride on the roof of the coach. I knotted myself in among the baggage tie-down ropes and we bounced away into the wind toward Albany. We came in on the Turnpike, which was rotten with mud, the wagon traffic moving so slowly outside the city that I leaped down and walked. I thought first of my old house, of which I had had no fear when the family took sick. But now the possibility of contamination waiting in it sent me into shivers and I decided to go instead to Emmett Daugherty’s.
I cut across the city’s western plateau and headed northeast in the direction the cattle drovers took when they moved the herds toward the river and swam them across to the Boston and New York trains. Emmett’s house was a cabin, primitive and temporary. He planned to build a proper house once he married, but it was still a cabin in this year, and when I neared it I saw his niece, Josephine Daugherty, feeding chickens in the front yard.
She eyed me oddly until I told her my name, and then she said she was Josie and that she’d heard of me. She was a small redheaded girl of twenty-five with more freckles on her nose and chin than any woman ought to be burdened with. She was a greenhorn, in from Clonmel only a few months, and keeping house for Emmett, who had overcome his lung illness and was again working for old man Fitzgibbon at his Albany ironworks. Josie invited me in for tea, fed me cold chicken and potatoes, and I was glad for it. Her presence clearly meant there was no bed for me in the house, and so I would need money. What arose in memory was the birdcage, so valued by my parents. I remembered our broken spade I’d left with Emmett, and that would be tool enough to dig up the cage.
“Will you sit with us till Emmett comes home from work?” Josie asked me, and I said no, that I had to move along and pick up something I had left behind.
“I’ve got an old spade with a broken handle stored out in your shed with our other stuff,” I said to her. “I have to do a little digging.”
“Are you digging a garden?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then you’re shoveling ashes or some such.”
“No.”
“You won’t say what it is.”
“No.”
“Then you’ll hear no more foolish questions from me,” she said, and abruptly left the room. I was sorry, but it wasn’t any of her business. I went out the back door. I found the spade, took it back to the house and showed it to Josie, and she was all right again. She had a round face and a low forehead, both of which I have associated with nosy people ever since. There was nothing pretty about her and I made a wager with myself she would never marry. She was not smart, like Maud, and Maud was beautiful and the opposite of nosy.
“I’ll be going now,” I said to Josie. “I’ll come back someday and wait for Emmett to come home.”
“You’re very young to be alone on the road,” Josie said.
“There’s younger than me on the road,” I said.
“And the same in Ireland. It’s a desperate time to be a child.”
“I don’t feel like a child anymore.”
“Well, now, aren’t we the grown-up?”
“We might be that,” I said.
Josie made me two sandwiches and it was four in the afternoon when I left her, a day in mid-April, clear and sunny but growing chilly, with sundown an hour away. I would wait until dark to dig up the cage, but what I thought to do was approach our old house, imprint its image on memory, and say farewell to it forever.
I walked toward the city, down the West Troy Road, and when I neared Van Woert Street I gave myself a choice: to approach our house from the rear, over our hill and down through the trees, or walk directly up the street and perhaps meet old neighbors. Explain solitariness if you can: that I, more alone than I had ever been in life, did not want to encounter old neighbors, not even boys my age who’d been close friends. I was such an outcast from all that was home that I craved the intensification of exile. I believe I avoided friends from fear of what proximity to their comforts might arouse in me: anger, perhaps, or envy, or even the desire to steal from them. I saw their rooves and chimneys, their back doors and
windows as I neared the street, saw Gallagher’s spavined horse tethered in the back lot of Carney’s grogshop, where my father used to drink. I saw the food store run by Joe Sullivan, who had only one arm. I veered from it all and came at the street from behind the house of the widow Mulvaney, whose husband raised goats before he ran off with a fancy woman and died of intense pleasure.
As I came onto the street proper I saw our house. The railing was off the stoop on one side, the windows all broken in front. Grass grew tall along the walls and in the cracks between the paving slates of the sidewalk. I had heard our landlord died of the cholera and that no one had cared for the house since we left it. The inert quality of the place, the absence of life, gave off a stark aura of isolation, and I now wonder whether I myself was giving off the same aura as I neared the place.
I was no sooner on the path from the Mulvaneys’ to our house than I saw Peaches Plum. He was with one of his brothers and they looked as alike as two peach pits: both blond and skinny, both shoeless. They were prowling about our house, I suppose scavenging, a late moment for that, though truly entrepreneurial scavengers believe in the bottomlessness of others’ dregs. They saw me approaching and Peaches called me by name.
“Yeeouuu been diggin’,” he said to me.
“No,” I said.
“Then why you totin’ that shovel?”
“ ’Cause it’s mine.”
“Ain’t nothin’ in your house,” Peaches said.
“We took most stuff out when the family died,” I said. “What we left wasn’t worth nothin’.”
“You a smarm,” Peaches said. “Smart little poop.”
“You think what you want, Peaches,” I said, and I walked around him toward the house.
“You gonna dig somepin’ with that spade?” he said.
“No, I’m just totin’ it,” I said.
“What good’s a broken spade? Lemme look at it.”
“Leave it alone, Peaches,” I said, and I picked up a rock the size of a potato. “And you leave me alone, too. I ain’t in none of your way, so don’t you go bein’ in mine.”
Peaches respected rocks. He and his brother (we called him Outa) stared me down and picked up rocks of their own. I kept my eye at a level with Peaches’s and picked up a second potato, which made Peaches respect me twice as much. Peaches nodded at me and smiled. Then he wagged his head at Outa, and they went their way and left me alone with two fistfuls of rock. I stood where I was and knew they would look back, both of them, and they did, for the snake is the primal contortionist.
At last they were gone and I dropped the rocks and went to where I had buried the cage: the grove of trees behind the house, a stand of elms and cedar that had grown tall and interwoven their family virtues into a small but quite lovely haven of shade and intermittent sun that allowed for an almost tropical arousal of plant life. A fist-sized rising of water came from the ground halfway up the abrupt hill that sheltered us from northerly winds, and then it trickled down into the grove. This was a spring I had discovered at an early age and claimed as my own, and its water had the dark, sweet taste of the silent stones at the center of the earth.
I went to the spring and drank of that cold clarity to cleanse my mouth of the dust from the road, then sat in the fading light of the grove to await the safety of darkness. When the moon gave me light to work by, I dug up the cage that had been so indefinably valuable to my parents.
I looked at it in the moonlight but saw nothing beyond its basic shape. I could not tell whether it had rusted from being underground or was merely discolored from the soil. I yearned for light but yearned more to be indoors to evade the chill that was sinking into my bones. I looked steadily at the black shadow that was our derelict house and grew brave enough to argue with my fear. Had I not already survived in that house during the plague’s heat? Would I not now survive its cold ashes?
I picked up my spade, pack, and birdcage, and at the back door I reentered the circus maximus, where my family had battled and died under my spectator’s eye. I sealed all doors against the night, found the kitchen windows to be intact, and I closed off that room as my retreat. I lighted a candle from my pack and set the birdcage on the floor beside it. I made ready to eat some of the food Josie had given me but then in the window I perceived my image, illuminated by the reflected candlelight. What I saw was a body and a face I barely knew. I was too big for my clothes and I was urchin dirty, but urchin no more. My face had been wrenched out of the puffy adolescence of reasonable expectation. That condition, said my mouth and eyes, is a luxury that is part of your past.
I sat beside the birdcage and studied it. Its slender bars had rusted, as had the round, heavy plate that was its bottom. I let the candlelight search out its secret, but I could find no secret. As I handled it, two of its bars snapped from the rusting.
What was I to do with such a worthless object? What was its meaning? I stared at it while I ate a sandwich. I wondered whether my mother and father had made a talisman of the cage, imposing upon it the values of the people of Clonmel, Cashel, and the towns in Mayo and Tyrone where the family had flourished. My father’s life was troubled from the time he was two, his father running off then to America. When Pa came here himself he never tried to find his father, nor did I, nor will I. Maybe Pa came with a birdcage instead of memories, but if he did, that was years behind us, all value long gone certainly from this rusty relic on the floor in front of me. My parents were gone themselves, along with their unknowns, all now remaining of what they deemed valuable embodied in me, this urchin particle floating in time, waiting for the next blow to fall.
My candle died with a guttering hiss; I lay my head on my pack of rags, and I fell asleep thinking of the cool and soothing quality of water. I awoke to a noise and opened my eyes in daylight to see a form moving away from the kitchen window. I sat up and immediately gathered my belongings to move out, and as I did, the kitchen door opened and Peaches and his brother walked through it, carrying clubs.
“I seen where you dug,” said Peaches, looking around the room. “You dug up that cage,” and he picked it up and looked at it. It looked even more worthless now than it had by candlelight.
“It belonged to my mother. I wanted to see it again.”
“I think I’ll jes take it with me.”
“Take it,” I said. “It ain’t worth a penny. I was just gonna leave it where it sits.”
Peaches opened the cage door and one hinge broke. He grunted and dropped it and the bottom came loose.
“I remember when my father buried it,” I said. “I thought he might’ve put a bag of money in it.”
“Bag of money? I’d like to have some o’ that.”
“Wasn’t no money in it. You find any money in this house I’ll cut it up halvies with you.”
Outa Plum tipped the contents of my sack onto the kitchen floor: clothes, candles, matches, a sandwich, and a glove that belonged to Maud.
“You got no money at all,” Peaches said.
“None.” I pulled my pockets out to prove it.
“Then I’ll just take this birdcage,” Peaches said, picking it up.
“Take it. Only thing you can’t take’s my spade. Worth a lot of money, that spade. My daddy used it when he dug the grave of Andy Jackson. People’ll pay me a lot of money for it when they know it buried a President of the United States.”
Peaches dropped the cage and picked up the spade.
“I just better take this ol’ spade,” he said.
“Hey, you can’t take that,” I said and I moved toward him. He threatened me with the spade and Outa raised his club at me.
“I’m gonna tell somebody,” I said. “I’m gonna tell your folks.”
Peaches and Outa smiled. “You tell ’em,” said Peaches. “You jes tell ’em.”
They backed out the door and ran with the heirloom. I smiled myself and put my things back in my sack. I looked at the cage. I could not abandon it, despite its being worthless. As I picked it up, the
ruptured base separated further and I saw the cage had a false bottom. I pulled the covering off and found beneath it a circular metal disk bearing an odd trompe l’oeil design. Now it was a screaming mouth with vicious eyes, now a comic puppy with bulbous nose and tiny mouth. Depending on where the light hit the eyes they were glassy, or sad, or hypnotic. I had no time to dwell on the disk for I feared Peaches would change his mind about the spade. But I believed the disk was valuable in some way yet to be understood. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. It might be a platter. It might be gold, or silver, for it had not rusted. But even if it wasn’t precious metal it had value as a thing to look at. I stuffed it into my sack and left the house, brimming with a brand-new faith in the unknown that I had found at the bottom of a birdcage.
THAT MYSTERY REVEALS ITSELF quickly only to those without the imagination to perpetuate it is a fact that came clear to me when I decided my newfound disk might have been a serving platter for potatoes.
“Potatoes?” exclaimed Will Canaday. “Why, it’s too small for potatoes. And what’s more, it’s flat as a coin. They’d roll off.”
I saw Will had a point and the mystery of the disk continued. That mystery, along with my desolation and my desire to abdicate forever the river and the canal, had an hour earlier led me into a reverie as I left Van Woert Street. You know nothing, the reverie began. You are a penniless, ignorant orphan who thought the Mexican War was fought in Canada, and you let John the Brawn steal your most valuable possession. You are inferior to everybody in something, even to Peaches Plum, who knows stealth and violence better than you. Quinn, when will you become wise, or even smart?
This question brought back Will’s words to me when we were leaving Hillegond’s mansion: “If you find yourself interested in an education, or in the life of the mind, come and see me.” And so in my reverie on ignorance I thought of the Albany Chronicle as a source of enlightenment about both the disk and my future.