Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [447]
He lit a fresh cigar and tried to fancy himself as the prosperous Paddy Lonigan he had been just a couple of short years ago, walking back through these changed scenes of his boyhood, trying to keep his mind on the distance he had travelled since those days. He suddenly caught the odor of decay and stink from the nearby stockyards that were just south of this section. He smiled. Just like old times. That was something he hadn’t thought of in years, golly, the stockyard smell. In those days he had always lived in that smell and gotten not to mind it. He tried again to keep his mind on the distance he had travelled since those days. But what did it mean now? He cursed. They were robbing him. Goddamn it, they couldn’t take his building. They couldn’t. He’d get a shot-gun and defy them.
A crowd was gathered at the end of the block, and he walked more rapidly toward it, noticing, as he approached, that there were policemen. Trouble. Coming up to the crowd, he saw a bailiff and two workingmen removing an assortment of ancient and scratched furniture from a three-story brick tenement while three broad-shouldered policemen stood about with surly, challenging expressions. A lean woman in a ragged black dress sat in a stuffed chair with a baby in her arms. Beside her, a leathery man stood, talking down at her. Two unwashed girls of ten or twelve, and a small boy with holes in his stockings stood beside the man, crying.
“Get back,” a policeman said to a ragged kid who ran toward the furniture.
“This can’t go on forever,” a small, nervous man in overalls and a blue shirt said, too loudly, and a ruddy-faced policeman walked quickly toward him.
“What did you say?”
“Come on, break it up. Break it up,” a second cop called, quickly joining the first.
Lonigan stepped off the curb and aside.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Break it up.”
“Move on. Don’t block the sidewalk.”
Their faces surly, the crowd was edged down the sidewalk. Lonigan walked around the sidewalk, toward the corner. Might be trouble, and he didn’t want to be mixed up in any riots or trouble. There had been riots, started by the Reds, in the Black Belt when niggers had been evicted. But that poor family. Losing their home, four children, too. Poor fellow, must be out of work. He remembered the remark of the small, nervous man. Could these hard times go on forever? His own building, they were taking it away from him, the building into which he had put all the money earned by the sweat of his own brow. Yes, it was earned by the sweat of his own brow. They couldn’t take it away from him. They couldn’t.
He passed a box-like, red-brick factory, sooty, with smokeless cylindrical chimneys. The windows were dirty, many of them broken. He guessed kids had done that. Closed factory. That meant men out of work, machinery rusting, people with money invested in it getting no return. Ah, hard times were hard, and we needed a new man of the people in the White House, to end all these hard times and unemployment.
Two short blocks ahead he saw a crowd gathered on a corner. He hastened forward on tired feet, breathing asthmatically, to see what was up.
IV
Strange music filling the street, the shouts and cries of an approaching throng headed by an overalled white man and a Negro carrying an American and a Red flag, policemen stretched along the curbs in both directions, shabby people behind the line of bluecoats, a crowd constantly augmenting in front of