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By Root 2520 0

along them till his lungs blew out. He pitched forward into a ditch and waited about nine years to see if they were on his tail, and they weren’t, but his brother Chick and his buddies Patsy McCall and Martin Daugherty were; and when the three of them reached his ditch they all ran north, up past the lumberyards in the district, and found refuge with Iron Joe Farrell, Francis’s father-in-law, who bossed the filtration plant that made Hudson River water drinkable for Albany folk. And after a while, when he knew for sure he couldn’t stay around Albany because the scab was surely dead, Francis hopped a train going north, for he couldn’t get a westbound without going back down into that wild city. But it was all right. He went north and then he walked awhile and found his way to some westbound tracks, and went west on them, all the way west to Dayton, O-hi-o.

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 runnin’ like hell, runnin’ like I’d just run, and I see two guys chasm’ him, and one of them two doin’ the chasm’ looks like a cop and he’s shootin’. Stoppin’ and shootin’. But this fella keeps runnin’, and we’re gettin’ to him when I see another one right behind him. They’re both headin’ for the train, and I peek around the door, careful so’s I don’t got me shot, and I see the first one grab hold of a ladder on one of the cars, and he’s up, he’s up, and they’re still shootin,’ and then damn if we don’t cross that road just about the time the second fella gets to the car I’m ridin’ in, and he yells up to me: Help me, help me, and they’re shootin’ like sonsabitches at him and sure as hell I help him, they’re gonna shoot at me too.”

“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