FRANCIE COUNTED THE YEAR’S PASSING NOT BY THE DAYS OR THE
months but by the holidays that came along. Her year started with the
Fourth of July because it was the first holiday that came along after
school closed. A week before the day, she began accumulating firecrackers. Every available penny went for packets of small crackers. She
hoarded them in a box under the bed. At least ten times a day, she ’d take
the box out, re-arrange the fireworks and look long at the pale red tissue
and white corded stem and wonder about how they were made. She
smelled the thick bit of punk which was given gratis with each purchase
and which, when lit, smoldered for hours and was used to set off the firecrackers.
When the great day came, she was reluctant to set them off. It was
better to have them than to use them. One year when times were harder
than usual and pennies could not be had, Francie and Neeley hoarded
paper bags and on the day, filled them with water, twisted the tops shut
and dropped them from the roof on to the street below. They made a nice
plop which was almost like a firecracker. Passers-by were irritated and
looked up angrily when a bag just missed them but they did nothing
about it, accepting the fact that poor children had a custom of celebrating
the Fourth that way.
The next holiday was Halloween. Neeley blackened his face with soot,
wore his cap backwards and his coat inside out. He filled one of his mother’s
long black stockings with ashes and roamed the streets with his gang
swinging his homely blackjack and crying out raucously from time to time.
Francie, in company with other little girls, roamed the streets carrying a bit of white chalk. She went about drawing a large quick cross on
the back of each coated figure that came by. The children performed the
ritual without meaning. The symbol was remembered but the reason forgotten. It may have been something that had survived from the middle
ages when houses and probably individuals were so marked to indicate
where plague had struck. Probably the ruffians of that time so marked innocent people as a cruel joke and the practice had persisted down through
the centuries to be distorted into a meaningless Halloween prank.
Election Day seemed the greatest holiday of all to Francie. It, more
than any other time, belonged to the whole neighborhood. Maybe people
voted in other parts of the country too, but it couldn’t be the way it was
in Brooklyn, thought Francie.
Johnny showed Francie an Oyster House on Scholes Street. It was
housed in a building that had been standing there more than a hundred
years before when Big Chief Tammany himself skulked around with his
braves. Its oyster fries were known throughout the state. But there was
something else that made this place famous. It was the secret meeting
place of the great City Hall politicians. The party sachems met here in secret pow-wow in a private dining room and, over succulent oysters, they
decided who’d be elected and who mowed down.
Francie often passed by the store, looked at it and was thrilled. It had
no name over its door and its window was empty save for a potted fern
and a half curtain of brown linen run on brass rods along the back of it.
Once Francie saw the door open to admit someone. She had a glimpse
of a low room dimly lit with dulled red-shaded lamps and thick with the
smoke of cigars.
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