Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker

Author:Kevin Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

It wasn’t enough for them. On Friday nights the other butcher boys would go up to Bunker Hill—the remnants of an old fort, abandoned since the Revolution, on a little rise above Grand Street. There a proprietor from the Fly Market had arranged hundreds of long benches in a circle, and planted an iron pole in the middle. He would chain a bull to it, and charge them all a penny to watch. All the butchers and skinners, and the butchers’ boys and mechanics’ apprentices, and all the other workies—still wearing their white paper caps, the leather aprons tied around their waists.

Tom would go with them, for the company. That was his failing, he recognized it. He confessed it each week at St. Patrick’s, though the old priest behind the latticework barely understood.

It is natural for man to be with others. These are not impure thoughts, are they?

Bless me, Father, but I hate it.

He went along because he liked the company of men. Still dirty, and bloodstained and sweat-soaked from their twelve hours’ work. He liked to be around them, to hear them cursing and guffawing, even to smell their rankness near him. He liked the company of men—but not what they liked.

The bull was always as fierce an animal as they could find. The rare kind they would get every once in a blue moon at The Place of Blood, that did not seem stunned or panicked into submission by the very sight of the slaughtering yards, or the smell of fear from so many of its fellow creatures, but only the more fearless and enraged for it.

Yet for all its bravery, its fate was always the same. The bull holding its own at first, huge and thick-chested, but Tom knew better. When they let the dogs into the ring, it wielded its head like a pair of swords, skewering them on its horns whenever they dared to lunge in too close. The butchers and the skinners and the apprentice boys jumping up and yelling in their excitement. The workies throwing down their bets, their few pennies on the bull.

But the dogs were half-starved, and canny, and the smell of the bull before them drove them to work together. Becoming a pack before their eyes. They darted in, one after the other. Tearing out the tendons in the bull’s back legs until it stood immobilized and exhausted before them. Still chained to its pole, staring out at them with yellowed eyes, filling up with blood. When they had tired it enough, the dogs would run in and tear out its belly, and its throat. The butcher boys cheering louder than ever—as if they did not see enough of this, every day of their working lives.

That was what had convinced Tom to go and find her. What had convinced him that there must be something more than this, what he did and what he ate, and what he sat through for entertainment every Friday night.

He liked the company of men, but not what they did.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.