Prologue
September 1889 • Boston Harbor
The steamboat puffed and chugged through the harbor, cleaving the gunmetal water in front and churning it white like boiling laundry in the back. The boat was at the halfway point in its ten-minute trip, with its bow pointing toward the leafy island and its stern saying good-bye to the gray buildings of Boston.
Built to hold twenty, the Pilgrim had only three passengers this morning: one man piloting the boat, and two boys who were an age somewhere between knee pants and shaving razors. The pilot and the blond boy were squinting in the sun, looking for the island to come into view, but the other boy saw only the damp bottom of the boat as he gripped the seat, white-knuckled, face ashen.
Bored with a trip he had made a hundred times, the pilot thought about his charges. The Weston brothers, the superintendent had said. That didn’t happen often, two accepted at once. Funny, how the pair of them looked as different as chalk and cheese. That one Charles—quite a scrapper with that upturned nose, leaning over the edge of the boat into the breeze, grinning and catching the salt spray on his face. Was he actually tasting the spray? Happy fellow. Too bad the brother wasn’t like- minded. Back at City Point, that one, Arthur, had looked around in a panic with huge brown eyes, lashes long as a girl’s, and that was the last he’d shown his face. The boy had planted his chin on his chest the minute he sat down in the boat, and hadn’t moved since. Hope he’s not ill, the pilot thought. Might they quarantine him? Won’t do to be getting the other boys sick.
“Charles, how fares your little brother there?” the pilot called out.
Charles looked over to the pilot while putting an arm around Arthur. “Nothin’ a little dry land won’t fix. He’s a mite nervous ’bout the water.”
Arthur shrugged his brother’s arm off his shoulder and hung his head even lower. Odd. Why wouldn’t he take comfort from the only kin he’s got left? But the pilot only had time to puzzle over this for a few moments before they arrived. Ah, well, he thought as the boat bumped against the wharf and he wrapped a hairy rope around the pier post. Who can fathom what goes on inside a family?
Charles and the pilot helped Arthur out of the boat and walked him well away from the water. Right away the color began to return to his face. The pilot went back to the boat and retrieved the two sacks that held all of the boys’ worldly possessions, and when he plunked them down, little clouds of dust puffed and then settled on their boots.
Their eyes all raked up the hill to the imposing brick building at the top. “Welcome,” the pilot said, hands on hips, “to the Boston Asylum and Farm School for Indigent Boys.”
Chapter 1
April 1889 • Boston
Charles Wheeler was very, very hungry.
This wasn’t the mosquito buzz of hunger that he felt in most of his waking hours, familiar as his one pair of dirty trousers. It wasn’t the hunger that hit him like a boxing glove when he woke up in the morning after dreaming of roasts with gravy and tarts with fruit fillings that ran between his fingers. No, this was the grinding hunger of a missed meal. Or what passed for a meal.
A year ago, when he first started living on the streets, Charles went for hours without thinking about food. He could swipe a few apples off a cart, duck into an alley to eat them, core and all, and feel so full that if another apple had rolled into the alley, he would have stuffed it in his pocket for later. But now his twelve-year-old body was hungry all the time. It had grudgingly come to accept a schedule of small but regular deliveries of food, but today, with the routine disrupted, his hunger blotted out everything else.
If he had anything at all in his stomach, he would be down by the waterfront, relaxing and watching the boats unload their cod and haddock as he leaned up against a greenish pier post. But for thieving at this time of day, there was only one place to be: Washington Street. The sidewalks here were so crowded that foot traffic spilled out onto the cobblestone street, slowing the progress of carts and carriages, and you had to yell to be heard over the thrum of the crowd and the occasional neighing of horses. Awnings reached out from building fronts, signs shouted from every flat piece of facade, gaslights stood in defiance of the mass of humanity flowing around them. This was where Boston was most alive, and with all these dis- tractions abounding, there was no better place to steal and get away with it. So Charles’s lack of success today was driving him a bit mad.
When he was this hungry, his eye fell on boys his age—with shoes, with shirts that had no holes at the elbows and pants clean enough to tell their color—and he imagined with bitterness how they would head home at the end of the day. How their mothers would have supper waiting, curls of steam rising from the serving platter, and how those boys didn’t even mutter a thank-you before they bolted from the table, didn’t appreciate food appearing when they wanted it. Charles knew this because several years ago, this had described him as well, though he didn’t see himself in these other boys. He just felt resentment smoldering in the pit of his stomach. He hated these boys, spoiling their appetite at the penny candy store in the late afternoon, climbing into their beds every night with a full belly.
Early this morning, he had gnawed around the blackened parts of two raw potatoes he’d found behind a grocer’s shop, but since then, he’d eaten nothing. Not for lack of trying, of course. But every pushcart vendor seemed to read his intentions from twenty paces, and every trash barrel behind a restaurant had already been picked clean by some guttersnipe.
Around midday he’d changed strategies and turned his attention to the acquisition of money, but that approach was proving equally fruitless. Twice this afternoon he’d seen a promising situation while scanning for unguarded funds, but in both cases, it required stealing from a woman, and he had yet to cross that line. In the winter, this was a particularly hard rule to follow, since he often saw ladies with their reticules resting just inside their fur muffs, practically begging to slip out. But still he’d stuck to targeting men, and now as the sun slid down behind the buildings, he saw the mark he’d been looking for.
The man carried several cloth sacks and was negotiating the price of flowers with a street vendor. His red hair and fair complexion suggested a recent boat trip from Ireland, which made him an appealing victim, since Charles was of the firm opinion that the city was lousy with Micks. Until the day she died, Charles’s mother had complained bitterly about how all the dirty bogtrotters took the washerwoman jobs away from decent Americans such as herself, and Charles had never thought to question this judgment. Now that petty crime was his means of survival, he reasoned that stealing from the Irish was ideal—in a way, it was returning what ought to have been American money into his American pocket. And maybe if enough Micks got their pockets picked here, they’d go back to Ireland where they belonged.
When the man pretended to walk away from the cart until the vendor called him back for a better price, it brought a smile to Charles’s face. If he wasn’t mistaken, the man had a clubfoot. Perfect, Charles thought. Won’t even try to chase me.
Hands in pockets, Charles casually zigzagged his way over to the man, scanning for the police as he strolled. Seeing none, he pretended to look in a window at the sign for “Painless Dentistry” as he kept tabs on the conversation behind him. While the men argued on about the fair market price for roses, he became distracted by the advertisement, as he had a tooth on his right side that was aching more every day, and he knew from experience that the pain would only stop once the tooth was out. Maybe he could acquire enough cash to see what this new Painless Dentistry was all about. With a jolt, he remembered what he was supposed to be doing, just in time to hear the man say to the vendor, “All right, all right, ’tis a hard bargain you drive, but I haven’t time for this.” Charles counted two breaths to give the man time to bring out the cash, and then he slowly turned around.
Like a beautiful dream, there the man struggled: trying to balance his sacks on the vendor’s cart, pulling some bills off a small roll, bowler hat slipping down his brow. The vendor blew air through his teeth in impatience and looked over his shoulder. Daylight had faded, but the lamplighter had not yet made it to this street. The timing was perfect. Charles moved in quickly and yanked the roll of money out of the man’s hands.
He ran for only a few joyful strides before a horrible feeling swept over him like a wave of cold water. Half a block ahead, a policeman stared him down with a menacing glare. For a heart- beat, it was just the two of them alone on the busy thoroughfare, neither of them moving, the policeman getting a good look at the filthy street Arab that had just grabbed an innocent man’s earnings, Charles unable to move his legs or even hide the stolen bills behind his back.
When the policeman took a step toward Charles, the spell was broken. Charles bolted across the street with the policeman in pursuit. From his constant scouring of this part of the city, Charles knew the layout of all the streets—better, he hoped, than the copper chasing him. He could hear the slap of the policeman’s leather shoes on the pavement behind him, but Charles’s bare feet didn’t make a sound as his toes hugged the rounded cobblestones for traction. When he thought there were enough pedestrians behind him to obscure the copper’s view, he dashed into an alley and stopped short before he ran into a pile of broken furniture and barrels. Quickly, he crawled behind a busted-up ash barrel toward the back of the pile and tried to slow his breathing, striving for silence and a limit to the amount of ash he was inhaling. In the near pitch dark, he tried to count off how many bills were in the stolen roll.
As his breath began to come more slowly, the only other sound in the alley was the squeak and rustle of rodents, Charles grinned. There were six bills, so a minimum of six dollars, perhaps more if they weren’t all ones. A fortune! He could eat for weeks, perhaps even get his tooth taken care of. On a rainy night, he could pay for a spot in a flophouse. And shoes, he could get shoes! Five minutes from now, he would walk out of this alley as rich as he’d been in recent memory.
Charles had spent his take several times over in his mind when he heard someone run into the alley. The furniture around him started to move, and a figure wormed its way into the pile, ending up in front of Charles’s barrel. He could just barely make out the shape of this person, who looked to be a boy around his size. The boy was balanced on his haunches, breathing hard, and clearly had no idea that Charles was there.
Now Charles had to noodle this new development. It was a safe bet that this boy was running from the police, which meant that any minute now the law could come charging into this alley. He quickly began to hate this intruder. After Charles had gotten away free and clear, ready to stride out onto the street to enjoy the fruits of his labor, this arsehole was about to ruin it all! What policeman would believe that two boys hiding in the same pile of trash were not in on the same crime? But much as he wanted to give the boy a rude shove and a few choice words, any noise could give them both away. His best hope was that the boy would eventually leave without ever knowing he shared his hiding space with another. So Charles would wait. It would be hard, pushing all that anger down, but it was worth it. Five minutes, maybe less. The boy would leave, and Charles would never see him again.
After a minute, the boy relaxed his tense posture a bit and covered his eyes with his trembling hands.
“Jaysus,” he whispered.
And of course he’s a goddamned Mick, Charles thought, and his rage boiled over. Forgetting his resolve, he gave the boy an enormous push, causing him to tumble out of the pile of trash and skid onto a patch of decaying produce.
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