Ironweed

That scab was the first man Francis Phelan ever killed. His name was Harold Allen and he was a single man from Worcester, Massachusetts, a member of the IOOF, of Scotch-Irish stock, twenty-nine years old, two years of college, veteran of the Spanish-American War who had seen no combat, an itinerant house painter who found work in Albany as a strikebreaker and who was now sitting across the aisle of the bus from Francis, dressed in a long black coat and a motorman’s cap.

Why did you kill me? was the question Harold Allen’s eyes put to Francis.

“Didn’t mean to kill you,” Francis said.

Was that why you threw that stone the size of a potato and broke open my skull? My brains flowed out and I died.

“You deserved what you got. Scabs get what they ask for. I was right in what I did.”

Then you feel no remorse at all.

“You bastards takin’ our jobs, what kind of man is that, keeps a man from feedin’ his family?”

Odd logic coming from a man who abandoned his own family not only that summer but every spring and summer thereafter, when baseball season started. And didn’t you finally abandon them permanently in 1916? The way I understand it, you haven’t even been home for a visit in twenty-two years.

“There are reasons. That stone. The soldiers would’ve shot me. And I had to play ball-it’s what I did. Then I dropped my baby son and he died and I couldn’t face that.”

A coward, he’ll run.

“Francis is no coward. He had his reasons and they were goddamn good ones.”

You have no serious arguments to justify what you did.

“I got arguments,” Francis yelled, “I got arguments.”

“Whatayou got arguments about?” Rudy asked.

“Down there,” Francis said, pointing toward the tracks beyond the carbarns, “I was in this boxcar and didn’t know where I was goin’ except north, but it seemed I was safe. It wasn’t movin’ very fast or else I couldn’t of got into it. I’m lookin’ out, and up there ahead I see this young fella ru

“What’d you do?” Rudy asked.

“I slid on my belly over to the edge of the car, givin’ them shooters a thin target, and I give that fella a hand, and he’s grabbin’ at it, almost grabbin’ it, and I’m almost gettin’ a full purchase on him, and then whango bango, they shoot him right in the back and that’s all she wrote. Katie bar the door. Too wet to plow. He’s all done, that fella, and I roll around back in the car and don’t find out till we get to Whitehall, when the other fella drops into my boxcar, that they both was prisoners and they was on their way to the county jail in Albany. But then there was this big trolley strike with shootin’ and stuff because some guy threw a stone and killed a scab. And that got this mob of people in the street all mixed up and crazy and they was ru

“I guess you been mixed up in a lot of violence,” Rudy said.

“If it draws blood or breaks heads,” said Francis, “I know how it tastes.”

The horse thief was named Aldo Campione, an immigrant from the town of Teramo in the Abruzzi. He’d come to America to seek his fortune and found work building the Barge Canal. But as a country soul he was distracted by an equine opportunity in the town of Coeymans, was promptly caught, jailed, transported to Albany for trial, and shot in the back escaping. His lesson to Francis was this: that life is full of caprice and missed co

When the bus stopped at the corner of Broadway and Columbia Street, the corner where that infamous trolley was caught between flaming bedsheets, Aldo Campione boarded. He was clad in a white fla

“I ain’t shakin’ hands with no dead horse thief,” he said.

“I ain’t no horse thief,” Rudy said.

“Well you look like one,” Francis said.

By then the bus was at Madison Avenue and Broadway, and Rudy and Francis stepped out into the frosty darkness of six o’clock on, the final night of October 1938, the unruly night when grace is always in short supply, and the old and the new dead walk abroad in this land.

o o o

In the dust and sand of a grassless vacant lot beside the Mission of Holy Redemption, a human form lay prostrate under a lighted mission window. The sprawl of the figure arrested Francis’s movement when he and Rudy saw it. Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere, were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead. This one belonged to a woman who seemed to be doing the dead man’s float in the dust: face down, arms forward, legs spread.

“Hey,” Rudy said as they stopped. “That’s Sandra.”