Mr. Sutton, you okay?
Sutton closes his eyes, lifts his face to the sky.
Mr. Sutton?
Coming, Mother.
Mr. Sutton?
THREE
CHICKENS, HORSES, PIGS, GOATS, DOGS, THEY ALL WALK DOWN THE MIDDLE of Gold Street, which isn’t a street but a dirt path. The city sometimes sprinkles the street with oil to keep the dust down. But that just makes it an oily dirt path.
Neighborhood boys are glad the street is dirt. Gold Street got its name because pirates buried treasure beneath it long ago, and on summer days the boys like to dig for doubloons.
There. A narrow wooden house, three stories tall, like all the others on Gold Street, except for the chimney, which tilts leeward. Willie lives there with Father, Mother, two older brothers, one older sister, and his white-haired grandfather, Daddo. The house is painted a cheerful yellow, but that’s misleading. It’s not a happy place. It’s always too hot, too cold, too small. There’s no running water, no bathroom, and a heavy gloom hangs in the tiny rooms and narrow halls since the death of Willie’s baby sister, Agnes. Meningitis. Or so the Suttons think. They don’t know. There was no doctor, no hospital. Hospitals are for Rockefellers.
Seven years old, Willie sits in the kitchen watching Mother, grief-sick, at the washbasin. A small woman, wide in the hips, with wispy red hair and bleary eyes, she scrubs a piece of clothing that used to be white and never will be again. She uses a powdered detergent that smells to Willie of ripe pears and vanilla.
The name of the detergent, Fels, is everywhere—newspapers, billboards, placards in the trolley cars. Children, skipping rope, chant the Fels advertising slogan to keep rhythm. Fels—gets out—that tattle—tale gray! Meaning, without Fels, your gray collar and underpants will tell on you. Judas clothes—the idea terrifies little Willie. And yet Mother’s constant scrubbing makes no sense. A noble effort, but a waste of time, since the second you step outside, splat. The streets are filled with mud and shit, tar and soot, dust and oil.
And dead horses. They keel over from the heat, fall down from the cold, collapse from disease or neglect. Every week there’s another one lying in the gutter. If the horse belongs to a gypsy or ragpicker, it’s left where it falls. Over time it swells like a balloon, until it explodes. A sound like a cannon. Then it gives off an eye-watering stench, bringing flies, rats. Sometimes the New York City Street Cleaning Department sends a crew. Just as often the city doesn’t bother. The city treats this nub of northern Brooklyn, this wasteland between the two bridges, as a separate city, a separate nation, which it is. Some call it Vinegar Hill. Most call it Irish Town.
Everyone in Irish Town is Irish. Everyone. Most are new Irish. Their hobnailed boots and slanted tweed caps are still caked with the dust of Limerick or Dublin or Cork. Mother and Father were born in Ireland, as was Daddo, but they all came to Irish Town years ago, which gives them a certain status in the neighborhood.
The other thing that gives them status is Father’s job. Most fathers in Irish Town don’t work, and those who do drink up their wages, but Father is a blacksmith, a skilled artisan, and every Saturday he dutifully, proudly places his weekly twelve dollars on the outstretched apron of Mother. Twelve dollars. Never more, but never less.
Willie sees Father as a fantastic collection of nevers. Never misses a day of work, never touches liquor, never swears or raises a hand in anger to his wife and kids. He also never shows affection, never speaks. A word here, a word there. If that. His silence, which gives him an aura, feels connected to his work. After eleven hours of hammering and pounding and swatting the hardest thing in the world—what’s to say?
Often Willie goes with Father to the shop, a wooden shed on a big lot that smells of manure and fire. Willie watches Father, streaming with sweat, slamming his giant hammer again and again on a piece of glowing orange. With every slam, every metallic clank, Father looks—not happy, but clearer of mind. Willie feels clearer too. Other fathers are drunk, on the dole, but not his. Father isn’t God, but he’s godlike. Willie’s first hero, first mystery, Father is also his first love.
Willie thinks he’d like to be a blacksmith when he grows up. He learns that when you make a piece of metal longer, you draw it, and when you make it shorter, you upset it. He learns to pump the bellows, make the flames in the hearth swell. Father holds up a hand, signaling careful, not too much. Every other week another blacksmith shop burns to the ground. Then the smith is out of work and the family is on the street. That’s the fear, the thing that keeps Father hammering, Mother scrubbing. One bad turn—fire, illness, injury, bank panic—and the curb is your pillow.
If Father never speaks, Daddo never stops. Daddo sits in a rocking chair by the parlor window, the one with the curtains made from potato sacks, delivering an eternal monologue. He doesn’t care that Willie is the only one listening. Or doesn’t know. A few years before Willie was born, Daddo was working in a warehouse and a jet of acid spurted into his eyes. The world went dim. The hard part, he always says, was losing his job. Now all he does, all he can do, is sit around and blether.
Most often he talks about politics, stuff that goes over Willie’s head. But sometimes he tells larky stories to make his youngest grandson giggle. Stories about mermaids and witches—and little men. To hear Daddo tell it, the Old Country is overrun with them.
What do the little men do, Daddo?
They steal, Willie Boy.
Steal what?
Sheep, pigs, gold, whatever they can lay their grubby little mitts on. Ah but no one holds it against the lads. They’re just full of mischief. Bad little actors.
Do you remember the exact spot where you were born, Mr. Sutton?
Sutton points to a tan brick building, some kind of community center. Tell them Willie Boy was—here.
Was it a happy childhood, Mr. Sutton?
Yeah. Sure.
Photographer shoots Sutton in close-up, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway behind his head. The expressway was built while Sutton was in prison. God what a monstrosity, Sutton says. I didn’t think they could make Brooklyn uglier. I underestimated them.
Cool, Photographer says. Yeah, brother, right there. That’s tomorrow’s front page.
Willie’s two older brothers despise him. For as long as he can remember it’s been true, a changeless fact of life. The sun rises over Williamsburg, sets over Fulton Ferry, and his brothers wish he were dead.
Is it because he’s the baby? Is it because he’s William Junior? Is it because he spends so much time with Father at the shop? Willie doesn’t know. Whatever the reason—rivalry, jealousy, evil—the brothers are so united against him, they pose such a seamless two-headed menace, that Willie can’t tell them apart. Or doesn’t bother. He thinks of them simply as Big and Bigger.
Willie, eight, is playing jacks on the sidewalk with his friends. From nowhere Big Brother and Bigger Brother appear. Willie looks up. Both brothers hold egg creams. The sun is bracketed by their giant heads.
So feckin small, Big Brother says, glaring down at Willie.
Yeah, Bigger Brother says, snickering. Feckin runt.
Willie’s friends run away. Willie stares at his jacks and his little red ball. His brothers move a step closer, looming over him like trees. Trees that hate.
It’s embarrassin, Bigger Brother says, bein known as your brother.
Put some meat on your bones, Big Brother says. And quit bein such a sissy.
Okay, Willie says. I will.
The brothers laugh. What happened to your friends, Willie Boy?
You