All for Love

Part One

Firkytoodling

1. Oshkosh, Wisconsin 1872

No grunt no ginger.

Earnest fake straining. Ginger was Baby McCourt’s favorite taste.

You finished, then?

Mamma, you don’t have to stand there no more. I’m perfectly capable of going by myself. I’m fourteen years old.

You’ll just sit there all night and piddle and gas.

I won’t!

First you don’t care to go, then you don’t care to leave. Mamma’s voice buttered the privy door. Baby pictured her pockets, one full of mousetraps, one stuffed with ginger. I never did pick the wrong one, she thought.

Nnrrrrrunh. Her eyes popped. She slapped her soft knees. She did like the sweet smell of pine oil, true enough. Quicklime, pine oil, kerosene from the lamp, fresh yellow pine of the new privy walls. The air in Oshkosh always smelled of yellow pine. Homeowners built new privies each year from slabwood and mill ends, wood being plentiful. Baby had once dearly wanted a playhouse big enough to sleep in, but Mamma said no. She liked fresh wood, strong tastes and smells, liver, ginger, clots of bubbling liquid. In the darkness below, she touched her little nockhole. Firkytoodling, Mamma called it. Fooling with holes. It’s what happened when you just piddled around.

I’m going, then. I’ll send your Da later to come fish you out.

Can I still have the ginger?

Her footsteps were gone. Mamma was amply warm but a worryguts. Mother and child, in the carol Silent Night, used to mean Mamma and her child, Baby. Baby’s given name was Elizabeth, but the general wish to cuddle her had never abated once she grew older, so she stayed Baby. When everyone sang Shepherds quake at the sight, it was she their voices had smuggled into Bethlehem, her sight they quaked at. She perversely clung to such half-deliberate errors because they made sense. The fire brigade came to set your room on fire, and this conviction filled her with terror whenever she heard the bells ring and dogs bark. The doctor called to make you sick, that’s what doctors were for, it worked every time.

Her address was Ten Street, not 10 Algoma Street.

Christmas carols were best, their clay was softest. In The First Noel, for years she’d assumed the third verse referred specifically to her:

This star drew nigh Elizabeth

O’er Bethlehem it took its rest.

She bellowed the words and everyone laughed. Then Aunt Maggie offered her the snapdragons in their flaming dish, and Baby folded back. She’d been set apart by their sparkling eyes. A beam of pure joy broke out of her throat. It felt like those times she’d pictured herself floating above the congregation during Mass at St. Peter’s, still in kneeling position. She pictured it now, seated on the hole. She’d been singled out, chosen! She showered down. . . .

By the time she realized her mistake about the song it didn’t matter anymore. One day Daddy acted disgusted. Is it Baby said that? Then Nealie told her where the star really drew nigh: in the Northwest. I always knew, she thought. I think I did. The knowledge flowed back and eddied through cracks and filled little crannies. It set. The world hardened.

The first time Mamma led her to the jakes she stood there all night urging Baby to finish, never realizing it was her very presence that prolonged her daughter’s stay. Thus, a habit was formed. When at last she did finish, Mamma had to help. Mrs. McCourt’s children-in-training were obliged to shout Wipe me! when ready, but Baby didn’t shout, she screamed out each word, she rattled windows nearby, causing Mamma to rush in waving corncobs in each hand. "Glory be, Baby, you’re yelling so loud every Paul Pry in town’ll know your private business, is that what you want?"

Later, Baby took her rosaries to the outhouse till Mamma found out and forbade it absolutely. Each round black seed planted prayers in her fingers. Firkytoodling on the seat, she prayed for the North to win the Civil War. Civil: courteous, polite, gallant. Clearly some words lied. Crack their hard shells, tongue out the meat. Oshkosh meant something noble in Indian, she wasn’t sure what, but sounded like staving in rotten pumpkins. Comics made fun of it at the Harding Opera House.

Oshkosh. Fog and nine-month winters. Tree stumps and slash piles. Volcano of the hemisphere, pincer of space . . . You could put words together where they didn’t belong. Trenchant cow. Baby’s whiskers . . . whiskey . . . ashcash . . .

Once Baby saw a man on the street outside a saloon dancing in a wool skirt. Hair on his face, black hair on his legs. He boasted out loud he hadn’t changed his clothes in seven long years. They must have been long! Daddy said he was a Molly Maguire, but Mamma averred as he was just drunk.

Charlie dogbreath, sheer lard, Sultana . . . No moths assaulted the lantern tonight. Pope’s nose. Ecstasy. She thought she heard breathing. The evening felt cold and dogs barked somewhere.

She unbuttoned one sleeve and carefully rolled it as far back toward the shoulder as possible. Despite the cold, the inner flesh of her elbow felt damp. She dearly kissed it. Harvey Doe had pronounced her that very day to be the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and said he’d go to hell and back for her. She flattened her tongue against the bare forearm and ran her rosebud mouth up and down, wrist to elbow, elbow to wrist. She practiced moans. Inflated the muscles and felt them hard against her teeth. A match blossomed somewhere—in her heart, she assumed. She confessed her sins, committed them again, confessed them again, longing for more.

When Katherine O’Neill danced the transformation dance at the Harding Opera House, first she marched around in military drill, hoisting, unshouldering, and spinning a gun. She kicked high on fat legs and fired blanks at the audience. Then an unseen angel pulled a strip string backstage and her uniform flew off and she became a washerwoman. The gun became a paddle swirling in the washtub. She danced an Irish jig and sang Throw ‘im Down McCloskey. Then that dress flew backstage and she stood there with a spade and a French maid’s short skirts with heart-shaped bib. She mimed digging holes while hopping about, rolling her eyes, leering and winking.

Her forehead looked like a nest of seething veins, but her face was all suggestive pronouncements. She wasn’t singing now but mouthing silent words. Eye strings on the strain. Legomania! The band thumped and scraped. High stepping forward, she bent at the waist as though eager to plunge into everyone’s lap. Baby couldn’t erase from her mind the lewd mouth, the tongue worming out, the mock infant innocence. Crooking one knee, she straightened up, thrust back her shoulders, lowered her chin, and licked her own thumb as though it were a lollypop. Daddy cheered wildly when the curtain dropped, but commodious Mamma with furrowed brow was herding her ducks out the theater already. Nealie, Peter, Philip, James, Willard, Claudia, and Baby, all raucously slaphappy. They plucked each other’s tails. They felt light as air.

Mamma and Daddy took Baby and her siblings to every new bill at the Harding Opera House. Among the better lives she imagined for herself, dancing on stage was the most angelic. She’d wear feathers and sing. How tedious to be told all your life you were pretty as a picture if no one ever saw you!

She cobbed her bottom and dropped the cob in, jumped to her feet, snatched up her drawers, pooched out her skirt. She fingered the sore grooves left by the seat on the backs of her legs. They weren’t sore until she stood. Something thumped outside. Who’s there? Claudia? I’ll scratch out your eyes! A rock struck the outhouse. Giggles unleashed. She unbolted the door and rushed into the darkness behind the privy, but tripped and fell. Two shapes ran up the alley.

The cold earth felt hard. Out here you could see the light from her lantern gullying cracks in the privy wall. Overhead, the moon. The moon’s a silver dollar... Leaves on the oaks scratched like paper in the breeze. Was it Claudia and Nealie or someone else? They sounded like boys. Feast your greedy eyes!

The ashpits had all been rained on that day and smelled like raw fog, lungs filled with dirt. The moon had a rash. She lay there smiling. She’d scratched her cheek. Good. It would last as long as the full moon lasted, not a second longer.

Harvey Doe returned the next day on his way home from school, having made a circuit around Main Street to longingly walk up Baby’s alley. He tried not to stare too much at her back porch, and averted his eyes entirely from the privy. The mayor’s son couldn’t be a poke-nose. Last night he’d braved raspberry thorns to catch a glimpse of Baby McCourt kissing her own arm. The sight made him prickle. Some nocturnal rite of the shanty Irish? He rushed straight home to strangle the goose after swearing to Will that he’d seen her private parts.

What color was they?

Red, guessed Harvey.

In persuading Will, he’d converted himself. Folds parted in memory, revealing more folds. Every corner of the afternoon rhymed with dark secrets. Walking down alleys was like peering backstage. He’d often dreamed of sailing through alleys on slow massive ships half submerged in earth. The backs of his neighbors’ lives opened up, those parts even they couldn’t see. Could they see themselves in nightshirts dashing through ankle-high grass to make water? Burning caterpillar nests, draping washed bloomers over privets to dry . . . cursing fouled wicks on the back porch at dusk?

Most people allowed the weeds and briars to grow behind their privies, to create a zone of privacy. Porcupines and rats made themselves at home there.

What was it this afternoon that dredged up pictures from dreams Harvey’d long ago forgotten? Behind one house, in a bower of unpruned lilacs and hawthorns, stood a low storage shed whose back wall consisted entirely of windows. They swelled with frames askew, reflecting the sky. He couldn’t see inside. As in his dreams, this shed was low and unplumb, a place to be prone in. Moss grew on the roof. Nothing happened in the dreams. It was where he lived away from his parents with rooms full of girls. Usually there were several buildings clustered near an alley, mazed by pathways of grass. Rooms opened into rooms with old iron cots and low slanted ceilings held up by posts and struts. He mostly slept and, inside his dream, experienced happy dreams without content. The sense of a blessed and secret refuge dimly glowing with ordinary warmth and sunlight on the floor is what he remembered. It makes more sense than anything I’ve heard concerning salvation at Sunday School, Mommy! He gawked at the shed. The place seemed to call him. Thick grass surrounded it. Actually, he’d likely glimpsed this very backyard and shed long ago, and it triggered those dreams in the first place. Of course.

If he were a ghost in a dream, he could sneak—no, walk boldly—into Baby’s house and watch her talk with her parents and brush her long hair and undress for bed and climb under the covers. He could watch her kiss her arm.

The air in the alley was blue and dusty and smelled of sawdust. If Oshkosh grew bigger, as his father predicted, it would do so by alleys dividing and swelling until the town mushroomed. Every street had an alley behind it, its shadow. He emerged onto Irving Street and followed it to Main.

Cameron and McCourt was Baby’s father’s shop. Peter McCourt made suits for Harvey’s father. From here, Main Street declined toward the river, where smoke rose from sawmills, shingle mills, and planing mills. The blue sweep of the lake ran east behind buildings, below the horizon.

Chubby Harvey whistled. Enormous rafts of logs floated offshore beyond the river’s mouth. Stacks of lumber ten and twenty feet high covered the piers and spilled up Main Street. As the logs got milled they were squeezed into new stacks between the old ones. The very timber from which the boards had been sliced had floated through town not long ago, down the Fox River, some on barges built from the same trees, some floating freely in jammed-together rafts. Harvey liked the wood best in heavy stacks. You could travel on the train between Oshkosh and Milwaukee and see nothing but stumps left from the Cutover. New houses and farms had gathered in hollows like seedlings blown there. He liked to imagine their house paint unpeeling, nails popping out, boards coming unstuck, running wounds closed, sap sucked back in, balloon frames collapsing. He ran it backwards in his mind but always stopped at the stacks, not the trees. The stacks were more striking, his father owned half of them. Barns, churches, and schools caved in, also fences, wagons, railroad ties, sidewalks, rafts, and slabwood cut up for burning. All folded themselves back into stacks, the gulched boards unshrunk and split corners tidied, then were loaded on barges and shipped back here and piled to the sky without a single gap, without one drop of light to trickle between them.

The buggy outside his house meant company. In the parlor, Papa introduced a man he called Senator Stephens. Cigar smoke filled the room. Will smoked cigars—he’d smoked one last night, in Baby’s alley—but they made Harvey sick.

‘Oiling the wheelbarrow,’ he says, said the senator. Elbows on knees, he leaned forward. He sat on the Does’ brown damask sofa, while Harvey’s father filled a stiff armchair. When Harvey Senior shifted his weight the room seemed to adjust. His son lingered near the door. He’d interrupted a story. ‘Leave it alone,’ says the boss, ‘what the hell do you know about machinery?’

Ha ha. Pat says to Mike, said Harvey Senior, ‘What would you do with a million dollars?’

I heard that one, Mr. Mayor. ‘Put six inches more on my pick handle,’ right?

Mayor Doe turned to his son. The senator here’s trying to sell us a gold mine.

Where?

Out to Colorado. He lowered his voice. Don’t tell your mother yet.

You got the future right here in Oshkosh, said the senator. Let the money you make here work for you there.

That’s what I figger.

I had two prosperous mines in Central City myself. Partnership in a twenty-stamp quartz mill, a miner’s boarding house, mines on Quartz Hill. I got more claims there too.

What about injuns?

They’ll be gone by the time you’re a grandpa, he said. He glanced at Harvey Junior. Maybe sooner, he added. This senator looked like a lumberjack to Harvey. He had the logger’s pox, made when one lumberjack stomps another’s face with his hobnails. His cheeks were sunk in.

You ever jack trees? asked the boy.

In my younger days.

We’re all lumbermen here, said the mayor.

But what do you do when there’s no more trees? The senator furrowed his prominent brow. He looked concerned.

Centuries won’t exhaust the pineries above us! Harvey’s father gestured vaguely north. If you and I planned it like this, sir, we couldn’t have come up with anything sweeter. Settling the West means you turn to the northern forests for lumber. But say we do cut them all. Even if that happens—which it won’t, I’m saying, but even if it does—so much the better. Our forests, like the savages they spawned, are only fit to be exterminated. That’s what I say. They hinder the plow and block the sunlight. When Wisconsin becomes one vast planted field of grain, then we lumbermen all shall be farmers, I say, and amen to that.

Or gold miners.

Told! You can’t have the West and its riches without you got a supply of lumber, upriver no less, to make it livable for Christians. Right here in Oshkosh, we’re right at the crux. All the forces of nature intersect here. We’re the bees that make the honey. The advantages of nature draw populations in, the populations draw in the raw materials from the tributary countryside, and the resulting spontaneous growth bodies forth the metropolis, see? What happened in Chicago will be dwarfed by Oshkosh in decades to come.

Never thought of it that way.

We’ll surpass them soon enough. The rings of fat around Mayor Doe’s eyes glowed with faith. His son wasn’t listening, he’d heard it all before. He’d been born on the frontier. That meant the forests of his childhood were just obscure green clouds now. All his life, all seventeen years, trees had surrendered their wood to people. Holes in the earth surrendering minerals at least had a whiff of novelty about it.

What say you, son?

Who’s Pat and Mike?

The older men laughed. Harvey, swimming in smoke, looked down. His stomach sloshed back and forth like water in a bucket. He waved the smoke from his nose and conjured a picture of Baby McCourt with hair red and curly, nose tip-tilted, round and soft mouth. It unclenched his bowels. Her blue eyes sat further apart in her face than any other girl’s he’d ever met, giving her a look of overflowing generosity just this side of lunacy. Her father possessed that same look too, but tamed it with precision. Constructing loose clothes took more architecture than nailing houses together, Harvey decided. He conceived of a sudden desire to be a tailor. He could apprentice himself to Baby’s father.

What’s so funny, son?

If Papa only knew. If he knew whose daughter his son was in love with!

Winter came early, as always in Oshkosh. The first snow powdered brown leaves on the oak trees. At home Baby never did chores, being precious. Her hands were too soft. She sat in the parlor and thumbed through a photo album. One picture showed Daddy outside his old store next to Mr. Cameron, hands behind his back. Last year the store’d been destroyed in a fire, but he rebuilt it larger than ever. It was prosperous times, he announced at home. They bought new furniture, made new dresses, hired a maid fresh from Norway. Mamma’d taught the maid to make snapdragons, and Hilde set the pan on the parlor stove now. Baby curled up on her folded legs. As the oldest girl, she sat next to Daddy, furthest from the stove, while he read the paper. Mamma didn’t want her to burn her pretty fingers on the flaming raisins, or to dry out her skin in the heat from the fire.

But the same Mamma raised no objection when the youngest, Nealie, plucked a raisin from the pan and rushed with the pale blue flame to her sister. Take it, quick!

You’ll burn yourself, Nealie, Baby cautioned. Nealie put it inside her own nose and held her breath. She squeezed out a slow squeal. She seemed to turn red.

Will you for God’s sake stop the nonsense! cried Daddy. He didn’t say By the pipers! or Great cripes almighty! because, Baby knew, he was practicing control. He’d been born in Ireland, as he bragged to his children, but more often these days he spoke of the Irish as though they were a foreign race. I’m a Catholic, he once said on a Friday, but I’ve a Protestant stomach. I could eat a plate of beef.

Mrs. McCourt patiently explained that one man from County Cork who’d done just that had choked to death in a New York restaurant only last week, but Daddy shook his head. His laugh was more splutter than laughter. Next you’ll be saying that Protestant men have to pray standing up, whereas their women are required to lie down.

Peter!

A sideboard overflowed with figurines and curios. Red tassels hung from the curtains on the windows. Peter Junior sat at the piano and stared at the snow falling outside. Because he couldn’t play, he was drawn to the piano as though to lithos of French cathedrals or women’s corsets. One finger on the high keys tried to imitate the snow.

Mamma sat sewing. Her husband was a tailor, but Baby knew he wouldn’t ask whose green skirt that was in Mamma’s lap being shortened and hemmed with a narrow band of fur. Our secret, she thought, is safe inside this parlor, land of the incurious.

I know something, Daddy! Nealie had pulled the raisin from her nose and swallowed it whole. She and Claudia stood at the stove, snapping up the flaming raisins. Ida Shelley’s entry hall windows are made out of sugar.

She’s an angel now, said Claudia.

No, she’s a Congregationalist.

Where does the child get such ideas? Daddy seemed on edge.

It’s all my eye, said Mamma.

I’ve never heard such foolishness.

It’s true!

Was the house warm when she was waked?

Nealie shouted yes.

Was there fires in the fireplace? asked Daddy.

Yes, there was!

The windows would have melted, then.

They look just like glass.

Maybe Daddy knew what the skirt was for and didn’t give a fig. He’d decided to allow his favorite daughter and her mother their little conspiracy, that’s it. No. Hardly likely. The skirt only barely came down to her knees! Half of Daddy’s customer’s were Congregationalists, including Harvey’s father. They lit their cigars entering his store, where the smoke got mixed with smells of broadcloth and varnish rising from the new counters. The smoke didn’t make Baby