Truck and Gilly looked at Johnny, but he signaled them with the slightest of nods to ride it out. Johnny had already passed down the execution order. “He’s got to go.” Johnny didn’t know where or when the party was going to take place, but he could sit back and let it go through channels.
“I know you think you’re the last of the tough guys, but you know what you are? You’re a cheap, lousy, dirty, stinkin’, mother-lovin’ bastard and I’m glad what I done to you. You hear that. I’m glad what I done. I’m glad what I done! And I hope they burn ya till you come out like a piece of black bacon that breaks to pieces when you touch it.”
“Listen, dead man,” Johnny said, speaking quietly, “I’d lay you out right here for the mother crack. But I can wait. Only I want to remind you one thing. Don’t get brave all of a sudden because you figure I’m on my way out. Because I aint. I’m still in. And I’ll be in when you’re eatin’ worms for breakfast, with the dirt thrown in free with every order.”
He turned and walked away. Truck and Gilly didn’t even bother to look at Terry as they hurried to fall back into step with the boss.
Terry watched them turn the corner, on their way to business as usual at the Friendly Bar. He was shaking now, but it was not from fear. It was exhilaration. This, even more than his hour on the stand, had cut him free of Johnny Friendly.
Father Barry went to see Terry a few days later and didn’t find him in his room. He returned the following evening and Terry still was not there. He left a note on the door for Terry to phone him, and when no call came through, the priest reported the facts to the police. They did not seem too concerned. They suggested that a loner like Terry might have shipped out or hitch-hiked west. However, if he failed to return to his rooms within a week, they would list him as missing.
Three weeks later the remains of a human being were found in a barrel of lime that had been tossed on one of the multi-acre junk heaps in the Jersey swamps. The coroner’s report after the inquest attributed death to twenty-seven stab wounds, apparently inflicted by an ice pick. No next of kin came forward.
The lime-mutilated corpse was never identified. But the boys along River Street, pro mob and anti, knew they had seen the last of a pretty tough kid.
Twenty-five
FATHER BARRY LOOKED AROUND at the monastic room that had been living quarters, office and a place of worship these past two years. He wondered what was being decided at the conference between his Pastor and the Bishop. Father Donoghue had been called up to the Bishop’s residence that afternoon, and it was rectory scuttlebutt that Pete Barry was marked for a transfer, perhaps to the small, Jersey harbor town of Leonardo, some seventy-five miles from Bohegan, near Sandy Hook.
Father Barry picked his baseball encyclopedia up off the floor and gathered up some of the waterfront mail that was strewn around. Mrs. Harris sometimes complained good-naturedly that Pete Barry was the sloppiest tenant the rectory had had in a long time and now the curate was doing his best to set his room in order, as if unconsciously preparing to take his leave of it.
There was a rap on the door and Father Vincent called in, “Pete, can I do anything for you?” Harry Vincent had disagreed with him bitterly, but now that Pete Barry was on the hot-seat, Father Vincent was rather surprised to find how concerned he was about his headstrong colleague. Even when Pete had called him a “smoke-pot-swinging metaphysician,” Father Vincent had been more amused than angry and even half willing to admit the beam in his eye if only Pete would acknowledge that he had a mote or two in his own.
“No, thanks, Harry, I’m just doing a little spring cleaning.” He preferred being with his own thoughts as he prepared himself for the possibility of having to move on from Bohegan and the work he had begun. He checked the time on the silver wrist-watch his mother had given him upon graduation from college. She was living with a married sister in Yonkers. His Sunday-afternoon visit was a family ritual. They would both miss that weekly talk if he was to be ordered to Lower Jersey. Mrs. Barry had been ashamed of herself for having to dab her eyes when she heard that her son might be transferred to some strange-sounding place she had never heard of. “Now what’s the name of the place they’re after sending you?” she had asked in her spry Kerry brogue. When he had repeated the persistent rumor, “Leonardo,” she had shaken her head disapprovingly. “Leonardo? I never heard of it,” Her world was bounded by Kerry on one side and now Yonkers on the other, and she was already convinced that her favorite son was being exiled into the wilderness. Pete had tried to reassure her. Leonardo was a perfectly respectable town of about 2500 on the South Jersey shore. The Navy had a pier there, but, except in times of emergency, the local longshoremen doubled as clamdiggers and lobstermen on this isolated waterfront.
“Waterfront,” Mrs. Barry had snorted. “Lord have mercy. You mean they’ve found you another waterfront!”
“Leonardo isn’t another Bohegan.” Pete had tried to smile to allay his mother’s fears. But inwardly he had been anxious and tense all week. He was beginning to get a grip on the job to be done in Bohegan. To him the act of raising the Host had become far more than a routine duty; it was a deep and intense identification with the Savior who walked the streets of Bohegan. Christ not only rose from the altar but came down to the waterfront and onto the docks. Christ in dungarees and a checked wool shirt, with a cargo hook in His belt, had one hell of a job on River Street, and Father Barry had been bracing himself to give Him a hand. Oh, brother, what a bunch of God-forsaken Catholics, Christians, citizens, human beings, human beasts He’s up against in this dioces!I He couldn’t help wondering if the Pharisees here in Bohegan wouldn’t like to see Him packed off to Leonardo if He started talking out of turn, say, at the foot of River and Pulaski Streets, and assembled there the longshoremen and checkers and truckers and watchmen and stevedores and union officials and shenangos and coopers and the steamship staffs and the boss loaders and the loan sharks and the numbers men and the hired squeezers of .38’s, and hit them with the beatitudes, “Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice’s sake”—hit them hard between the eyes and straight from the shoulder in the lingo of Port Bohegan.
He had tried to hide his anxiety from his mother. She had suffered years ago when her husband got the Siberia treatment for being an honest maverick as a patrolman, and now she was disturbed that this chip off the hard block had ventured beyond the bounds of his duty as a curate and thus had incurred the disapproval of the Bishop. He had done his best to convince her that he was already overdue for a transfer, customary for any curate after two or three years. He didn’t tell her, naturally, what he had said to Father Vincent when the Pastor had been called over to the Bishop’s residence: “Well, Harry, looks like I’m being sent down to the bush leagues.”
Father Barry went into the bathroom to wash his dirty celluloid collars. Then he bound his waterfront mail together with a thick rubber band and slid this batch of correspondence inside the cover of his much-thumbed volume of Xavier’s letters. He was going to sit down and answer every one of those letters at length, wherever he was. “The Power House”—as he and his fellow curates referred to the chancellery—had the authority to remove his body to Leonardo—or Timbuctoo—and he was ready to follow obediently if not resignedly. But, by God, they couldn’t cut off his lines of communication—of identification with the hard-pressed dock wallopers of Bohegan. If they did it to the least of them, they’d still be doing it to him, whether he wound up in Leonardo or God knows where. Isn’t that what he wore the vestments for? Isn’t that what these uncomfortable celluloid collars made his neck sweat for?
Half an hour later when the Pastor called him down to the office there had been an emotional flash recall of a boyhood panic, the stealing of the money for his kid brother’s red fire engine and his childish defiance, “If the priest gives me too much hell, I’m out of the Church.” But that priest of years ago had let him steal the base and called him safe. Now Father Donoghue was pretty much the same kind of man, a fa
ther who did his best to help his sons, even when he wasn’t altogether sure he was able to understand them.
Father Donoghue had let the curate express himself, and strongly, as to what he thought of his predicament. Some pastors would have pulled the check lines tighter, but Father Donoghue admired fighters. He had a growing respect for Pete Barry, and he remembered and approved of the Holy Father’s often neglected warning. “The Church is a living body and something would be lacking to her life if expression could not be given to public opinion within it. For such a lack, both pastors and the faithful might be to blame.” Father Donoghue could think of pastors, monsignors, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and even popes who had not always measured up to that wisdom.
“Pete, I had a good, long talk with the Bishop,” Father Donoghue began.
“Leonardo, here I come!” Father Barry broke in irresistibly.
“Pete, there you go again, jumping to conclusions,” Father Donoghue said quietly. “The Bishop has agreed to hold up the transfer for the time being. I must say he heard me out when I tried to point out the positive things you’ve been doing. But he does want you to, well, stay out of the limelight, no more interviews and sensational broadsides and that sort of thing, at least not until he’s had a chance to get the whole picture a little more clearly in his mind.”
Father Barry felt a sense of relief, even if this were only a temporary reprieve. “Father, I sure appreciate this. You’ve been a hundred percent. That’s more than I can say for somebody else around here.”
“I hope your feeling about the Monsignor won’t leave you bitter or sour,” the Pastor said. “We’re not infallible. We’re men. All kinds of men.”
“Father, you can say that again.”
“I’ve run up against bad men in the Church,” the Pastor admitted. “But I always found comfort in the thought that we’ll all be judged in time.”
“In the meantime,” Father Barry laughed, “this ecclesiastical in-fighting can get pretty rough.”
“Yes, it can,” the Pastor agreed. “I’ve always tried to stay out of it myself. But our Church is plagued with it like any other institution. Wherever there are honors, positions of authority and power, you are going to find men jockeying for them, men who are supposed to be above such things, great scientists, surgeons, philosophers scheme in their hospitals and their universities and their great foundations. And I’m afraid they will until the day that Christ comes for all of us.”
“I wonder if I can wait that long.” Father Barry’s sense of humor often cut into his most troubled moments.
“That may be one of your shortcomings,” Father Donoghue said gently. “But I think you made an important contribution in putting our faith into action on a front that can make religion a real force in the lives of our parishioners. You’re right, of course. Christ is in the shape-up and knows what it feels like to be left out in the cold or to be crucified for speaking up. I was very much interested in your leaflet. And I think we should continue the basement meetings. I understand there’s a group of at least a hundred who want to keep them going now. I call that progress. I think you’re on the right track about the Encyclicals too. They’re not meant to be abstracted away in lofty discussion. They’re to be applied on River Street. Yes, on Pier B. But Pete, you did make certain mistakes. Not briefing me so I could brief the Bishop. You let your opponents get the jump on you, and turn against you your—er—your adventure in the bar when you punched the unfortunate longshoreman, and then were seen drinking with him and later working on his testimony after I had warned you to be more prudent. And your own part in the hearings. It is true that you obeyed the order to remain away from the court room, physically. But you did present in writing a detailed plan of rehabilitation for the harbor which received a great deal of publicity. In it you said exactly what you would have said if you had taken the stand. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t impressed with the plan.”
“I only hope I have a chance to follow through on it,” Father Barry said.
“So do I,” Father Donoghue said. “I like your ideas for a control commission to screen out the criminal types, and for supervised, honest elections and regular, open meetings for the union locals, a rotation plan for the hiring, to get rid of the shape-up, a credit-union system to run off the loan sharks, and protection for the older workers, seniority, I think you call it, and a welfare fund. You see, Pete, I have read it pretty closely. I thought it was really excellent and I’m convinced our Catholic longshoremen should be encouraged to work along these lines. But Pete, again, the way you went about it was too far and too fast.”
“But Father, I had to move fast. The clock was running out.”
“Pete, if you had only cleared your plan with me I might have been able to buck it up to the Bishop and I think I could have talked it through. Instead he was hit cold with all those headlines about the ‘waterfront priest.’ Don’t you see what you did by rushing ahead?”
“I guess I did set myself up for a sucker punch,” Father Barry said. “Well, it was a gamble, and in a way I lost. But, Father, if anything ever does come out of this waterfront mess, at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing the stuff we believe in is getting across to some of our boys here in the harbor.”
“Son, you’re going to have lots of satisfaction. And lots of heartache. You’ve got a strong sense of justice and a strong conscience. That’s good, as long as you don’t defy authority. Some of the best men we had in all twenty centuries were in a lot of hot water trying to adjust conscience to authority. Yet we need both, a hunger for justice and acceptance of obedience.”
“It’s the acceptance of some of those other things that I find it tough to go along with,” Father Barry said.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Father Donoghue said, “I happen to know the Bishop is planning to have a long talk with the Monsignor. He thinks O’Hare has overstepped his bounds the other way in condoning waterfront evils. So don’t think too harshly of our Bishop. He may think you’re a little too chesty and want to cool you off a little bit. But he’s very much interested in the idea that we may be allowing our waterfront communicants to stray from the Church because we’re not taking a firm enough moral position in defense of their God-given rights. Believe me, Pete, you’ve stirred up some embers here that we’re going to keep burning. I want you to fan those embers, if at the same time you learn how to control the fire all round you—and in you.”
Rising, the Pastor put his arms out to Father Barry and embraced him. “I see it’s time for me to work on my sermon for High Mass on Sunday. God be with you, Pete.”
“God bless you, Father.”
Back in his room, Father Barry fingered the rosary given to him by the girl he used to go steady with in high school, and about whom he wondered now and then. She reminded him just a little bit of Katie Doyle. Katie had been in to see him before she left for Marygrove. She had changed; she was older; there was less of the onward-Christian-soldier, I-want-it-to-be-just-as-it-is-in-the-Missal. She had embarrassed him by apologizing for expecting him to solve everything overnight. Now she had had a taste of the complexities, a bitter taste. Now she knew that the sins of avarice and theft and murder in Bohegan were not to be shucked off like a snake’s skin, but had infected the body, deeply.
“Katie, I hope you never lower the fine flame of your indignation,” he had told her. “Even when you learn as you have learned that it’s going to burn you a little bit too.”
They had looked at each other a moment, and he had known that both of them were thinking of Terry and the way evil often intertwined itself with good, and the way life had of rubbing some of the quality of one onto the other.
It still hurt him to realize that Runty Nolan and Terry Malloy actually had been torn from this world and hurled into the next. Day after day he had tortured himself with the question of their sacrifice. Had human life been given in vain, and had he been worthy to ask this terrible price of them before weighing more carefully the val
ue of their offerings? I took their lives in my hands, he prayed. I stumbled upon these two most unlikely of martyrs, an old, tough-flint of a bar-fly and a fringe hoodlum. I took these two, and, right or wrong, I made them dare as St. Ignatius dared when he chose the Coliseum, saying: “I am God’s wheat: I am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts that I may end as the pure bread of Christ.”
From his desk Father Barry picked up the preliminary report just issued by the Crime Commission and flipped a page: “Criminals whose records belie any suggestion that they can be reformed have monopolized controlling positions in the longshoremen’s union; under their regime narcotics traffic, loansharking, short-ganging, payroll phantoms, shake-down and extortion in all forms—and the brutal ultimate of murder—now flourish and continue unchecked.”
Continue unchecked. In Father Barry’s mind those words ticked on: Continue unchecked. Tom McGovern was untouched. Everybody knew his word still thundered on the docks. Oh, yes, he had been passed over for the Order of Saint Gregory, and Father Barry took some slight satisfaction from that, but he was still a Catholic paying his own men less than the going rate and hiring gunmen to keep them in line. Still a Catholic…
Had the mountain strained to bring forth a mouse? And was the mouse poor Weeping Willie Givens? Yes, it’s true, Willie was under indictment for misappropriation of union funds. He had resigned, tearfully, avowing his concern for his beloved longshoremen to the end. Willie had been retired on half his salary, and the new president was Matt Bailey. He was fifteen years younger than Willie and not quite as paunchy. For years he had been president of the checkers’ union that worked jowl by jowl with Willie. And, of course, for Tom McGovern. That reform was the laugh of the waterfront, especially since the new Fat Cat was known as Smiling Matt Bailey. Father Barry could almost hear Runty laughing, “So now we got a smiler for a cry-baby an’ it’s the same difference.”