New York - The Novel

jobs in New York saloons, and nobody paid them much heed.
    “New York ain’t a very friendly place for a black man,” he’d warned Hudson.
    “My grandaddy told me we came from here,” Hudson had replied. “I was figuring to stay.”
    So Sean had given him a try, and Hudson had proved to be a good worker.
    “Is Hudson your family name?” Sean had asked.
    “My father was Hudson, sir. And I’m Hudson Junior. But I don’t have no other name.”
    “Well, you need a family name,” said Sean. “And ‘Hudson Hudson’ sounds foolish, in my opinion.” He’d considered. “Why don’t you take the name of River? Then you’d be Hudson River. That sure as hell sounds like a New York name to me.”
    And soon the young man was registered as Hudson River, and before long this curious name had made him something of a mascot in the saloon.
    “Hudson,” said Sean O’Donnell now, “step over and help me close these shutters, will you?”
    Together they closed the big green shutters that covered the two windows that gave onto the street. Then Sean went outside and began to push and pull on the shutters, which rattled quite a bit. Then he went back in, and asked Hudson if the latch for the shutters had seemed firm, and Hudson said no, not very.
    “Do you reckon you could fix a bar across the shutters that’ll hold them firm?” Sean asked, for Hudson was good at those things. And Hudson said yes. “I want you to do it today,” said Sean.
    “We expecting trouble?”
    Sean O’Donnell could smell trouble. You didn’t survive thirty-eight years in the streets around Five Points without developing an instinct for danger. From his youth, he could tell from the way a man walked whether he was carrying a knife. Sometimes he could sense trouble before it came round a corner—though he couldn’t say how he knew.
    Now that he was older, and had become a man of property, that same instinct had been transferred to his business affairs. His attitude to the financial community was characteristic.
    “The way I see it,” he’d told his sister, “since most of the men in Five Points will rob you if they get the chance, and since I know there isn’t a single alderman in the city that can’t be bought, why would the merchants on South Street or the bankers on Wall Street be any different? They’re all criminals, I reckon.” Part of the reason why nobody knew how much money he had was that he refused to entrust it to any financial institution. He lent money, certainly, to men he knew personally and reckoned a fair risk. He invested in numerous enterprises, which he could watch over himself. And he held government bonds. “The government’s as crooked as anyone else, but they can print money.” His hoard of cash, however, was kept in locked boxes, which he hid in safe places.
    This expedient, primitive though it might be, had at least saved him worry. Half a dozen years ago, when the head of the great Ohio Insurance Company, having made all kinds of shaky loans, closed the company’s doors and tried to abscond with the remaining funds, half the banks in New York, who’d lent to Ohio themselves, were unable to meet their obligations. Since all the financial institutions had lent to each other, without the least idea of what backed the loans, the panic of 1857 had soon spread halfway round the globe, and though it was brief, innumerable men on Wall Street had been wiped out before it was over. One clever fellow called Jerome, who came into the saloons quite often, had seen the crash coming just in time, and had bet heavily on the falling market. A few months later, he’d quietly informed Sean: “I made better’n a million dollars in that crash.”
    As for Sean, he’d just gone to his chest of dollar bills, bought up some property that was going cheap, and continued to serve drinks to anyone who still had the money to pay.
    But last night, listening to the talk at the bar, it wasn’t financial trouble he’d sensed. It was something much more visceral, belonging to Five Points rather than Wall Street. The crowd in the saloon on Saturdaynights was different from the rest of the week. Hardly any journalists. Mostly local Irishmen.
    And that’s what he’d sensed as he’d listened to them: danger. Irish danger.
    The Irish community respected Sean. If there were people in Five Points who still remembered his knife with fear, there were many more among the countless immigrants who had come in following the Famine