As she climbed aboard, Eileen answered, “Yes, but don’t come by the house anymore if you can. The old lady hates you and gets in a lather every time she sees you. Goodbye, Joe!”
“Goodbye, Eileen,” he waved, “I’ll be back here again tomorrow night.” The other passengers looked at them and smiled.
CHAPTER 6
THE WEST SIDE, 1917
When the wagons were all out on their routes, and Joe had finished the books, he took a break and walked over to the Rowing Club. He hadn’t gone to the Friday night function last night. Those guys will stay there until they get the last drop of beer out of the keg, he thought. Too much for me nowadays, as he thought of his wife at home.
When he approached the clubhouse, he heard someone inside dragging furniture, and was surprised by the sight of broken glass and shattered windows. The inside of the club was a shambles—chairs busted up, tables knocked over, bottles and glasses all over the place. Pete Gilhooly was in the process of turning one of the tables upright and, as he did, Joe noticed the bruise around his left eye that seemed to be turning blue, green, and yellow as he looked at him.
“Jaysus, Pete, what the hell happened here?”
“Ah for fook’s sake, Joe, you missed it last night,” he said, straightening up and stretching his back, pulling up the suspenders over his long johns shirt.
“What’s the other guy look like?” Joe jibed, jerking his chin at Pete’s face.
“Which one?” Pete smiled back. “It was a regular Donnybrook, that’s for sure. Those boys from down in your wife’s old neighborhood, down in the Ward, came by, knowing we have a good feed and beer Friday nights. A few of the Mutuals, but mostly the Celtics, and they’d been drinkin’ on their way here as well.”
“Oh boy . . .”
Rubbing his chin, Pete organized the details of the conflict in his mind and continued. “Well, they’re all welcome as good sportsmen and all, and we’re having a good time with the beer flowing and some real good beefsteaks and sausages and salami that we’d got, and naturally, there’s some talk as rivals do, no problems there. Then, one of the Celtic lads, I think his name was Gerry, said something about our having Dagos in the club, and as you might expect, the gimp gets upset at this and tells Gerry, I think that was his name, anyway . . . to shut his Pig Irish trap, and that’s about all it took for those two. Well, Gerry gets up and throws a punch at the gimp, and the gimp doesn’t even feel it, he’s so mad. Grabs your man Gerry by the neck and the crotch and tosses him, hmm . . .,” looking around, he finally pointed to one of the shattered windows on the river side of the clubhouse, “through that window, I think.
“Well, their boys all jump up at that one and rush the gimp. He bein’ a member in good standing and all, we jump up and the battle’s on.” Pulling his right fist back to his chin, he continued, “I had the one guy by the collar with my left, you see, and was just about to give him the right when someone threw a great heavy mug and got me where you see here,” touching his swollen face proudly. “The room spun, I saw stars and just started swinging for me life. After a few minutes, everyone tumbles outside and the lads get wrestling on the ground.” Shaking his head, Pete went on. “I think our more judicious use of the gargle then paid off, as their boys started getting winded and eventually retreated back to the mainland, as it were. We held our own, we did,” but looking at the damaged clubhouse, even Gilhooly thought the damage may have outweighed the glory. “Next time,” he vowed, “we’ll go down there and give them a what for.”
“I dunno if that’s such a good idea, General,” Joe commented.
“What? And let those guys think we’re cowards? We’ll bring the whole club, every one of us man and boy. We’ll show ’em.”
“Ahhh, Pete. If you bring twenty guys down there, they’ll have fifty. You bring fifty and they’ll get every Mick from Exchange Street to the Buffalo River, all of ’em with clubs and bottles waiting for you.”
Pete considered this possibility, and Joe finished, “Look, lemme go back to work. When I get off, I’ll come back and give you a hand cleaning up this place. Anyone else coming by to help?”
“Uh, yeah, I got hold of a few people who said they’d be by shortly.”
“Well, look, I’m the treasurer this year, so take a few dollars and go over to Winegar’s Hardware and get some glass panes, some putty, and a box of glazier’s points so we can fix these windows. At least they didn’t smash the sashes up.”
Joe left, thinking how he used to drink when he was single like Gilhooly, but he’d never been as much of a boozer or a brawler like these guys. The gimp, he thought, was a pretty tough customer these days. A lot different from the crippled little boy he used to be. Joe also thought about how much having a wife had changed him as he went back to work, and how much happier he was with his life that way. He chuckled, thinking, yeah, much better having a wife than having a three-colored shiner as a trophy like Gilhooly.
CHAPTER 7
BUFFALO, 1918
Torreo balanced on his spindly right leg and pushed with his left foot to roll the two-hundred-pound beer barrel up the ramp onto the wagon, then gripped the top and tilted the oak keg upright against the others. Last one today, he thought, the middle kegs stacked straight, the outside row of barrels tilted inward for balance, as the old Germans had taught him.
He hopped down from the wagon and watched a boy lead the team of horses slowly to the front of the great, heavy, wooden vehicle. Torreo mopped his brow with a big, red kerchief, thinking, Better you than me to the lumbering Percherons as they were readied to drag the heavy, oak wagon and the barrels of beer out to Buffalo’s countless saloons.
A small, blond-haired boy came running up to Torreo with a tankard of cool water. The boy, a grandson of the brew master, found the horses; the immense vats of frothing beer; and the incredibly strong men who would lift and move the wooden kegs of beer all day fascinating. Torreo was his favorite of all of them—the exotic dark Italian amongst the fair Germans, the one who seemed to be busting out of his shirt when he flexed, and whose one leg was as strong as most men’s two. He had seen him do tricks at company outings when the men would try feats of strength, balancing picnic tables while standing on one leg, or seeing how many people they could lift off the ground hanging from their mighty arms. “Being big is good,” Torreo would whisper to him as they watched the other competitors, “but the one that can balance the weight is the strongest.”
Torreo took the water and tousled the boy’s hair, and the two
of them followed the other men into the beer garden, where they relaxed over the free beer the owner supplied at the end of the day. Torreo always drank a couple of pints of water first, especially in the summertime, or his head would spin on the walk home. The boy, Phillip, ran up to the serving table, refilled Torreo’s water tankard, and grabbed one of the beers, which he carefully carried over to the long tables where the men sat. Running back to the serving table, his cousin Marta tried to give him a tumbler of birch beer, which he hesitated to take.
“No, no,” one of the other bartenders said, “put it in a tankard, girl, like the men have!”
Marta complied, worrying how long it would be before the boy started drinking beer, like the men. Returning to the table, Phillip squeezed in between Torreo and Hans, a special place at a special time of day for him, when he was among the strong men he hoped to become.
After a few minutes of work talk, the subject turned to sports, with arguments bolstered by quotations from the newspapers. Some men liked baseball, some horses, and some boxing, but the favorite sports in this crowd were wrestling and bowling, by far. The company had several bowling teams. They played on the grass in summer and indoors in the winter. The wrestling matches were arranged with workers from other breweries, and rivalries between their